American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with Martha Shelley, 2 of 2

Oh Good evening, me. Question. The police, let's just stick with New York City for now, you know, in the 60s, late 60s. They were probably patrolling hippies, smoking, doing drugs, you know, cracking down various groups. Do you think they treated gays differently? How did the cops view you? In the 60s, particularly in the late 60s, the cops cracked down on anybody who was not conventional, if you were propice, if you were a hippie, if you were black, and if you

were gay, and I don't think they made it that they were any harder on us than they were on some of these other people, I think the difference is that gay people had a harder time because they were more secretive towards their families and jobs. You couldn't be fired from your job for being black. You might not have gotten hired in the first place, but you wouldn't be fired. You would definitely be fired if you, you know, were caught with drugs and stuff. But I suppose if you were doing, if you were a hippie and smoking dope, you probably didn't have the kind of job you could lose. For gay people, the problem was if you were caught by the police, what they would do is they would call your parents, they would call your employer, they would make sure that you got punished not just by them for being gay, but by everybody else. Did you ever have, I mean, you sounded like you found this group with the daughters of

the latest, but do you ever have really dark moments where you just felt like, man, you're at odds with the world, you're alone? Boy, that's quite a question. I don't remember feeling that I'm just alone against the world. I knew there were other lesbians out there. I had dark moments when things were going bad in other situations, and I'm thinking particularly of the night Fred Hampton got killed when the police raided the Black Panther headquarters in Chicago and shot this guy dead in his bed. And I was over at a friend's house in the Gay Liberation Front. And I was frightened because I thought they would do that to us, that they were perfectly

capable of doing that to us. But I never felt that it was just me against the world, that I was the only gay person around. What's so bad about the raids, the lights would come on in a bar, and maybe from what I've heard, the patrons would sort of flee into the streets eventually. What was scary from a gay person point of view of being in a bar where they felt safe for the moment, if a cop were to identify them, what was at stake? If a cop came and arrested you in a gay bar, and it was not just one cop, it was a bunch

of them. First of all, you'd be dragged to the bar, I mean, you'd be dragged to the police. You would be sometimes photographed by newspapers. The police would often call your employer, or they caught you and you couldn't show up for work the next day because you were in jail. And if the police called your employer, you'd lose your job. And if the police called your family, your family would kick you out very often. There were a lot of gay people over and over again whose family kicked them out because they were gay. There was one person I knew who I believe her father killed her for being gay. So you would lose your family, you would lose your livelihood, you would very often lose the place where you lived. And that was the scary thing. And in some cases, and I've read about this, although I never experienced it, the police would rape the women.

Now of course, you can't prove that any more than you can prove police abuse in a lot of other cases. But I've heard stories from women that they were sexually abused by the cops. Now, New York was supposed to be, you know, gay people flocked to the village, didn't they? In the 60s? Or did you find me? There was more desirable place to go than a lot of cities and around gay people. What did the New York City symbolize? What New York City symbolized and why gay people came there, why gay people went to San Francisco and Los Angeles, was that you did have more freedom. Hey, what Whitman found that. If you were in a small town somewhere, everybody knew you and everybody knew what you did and you couldn't have a relationship with a member of your own sex period. If you came to a place like New York, you at least had the opportunity of connecting with people and finding people who didn't care that you were gay, finding the Bohemian life, finding people in the arts, if you were, you know, artistically inclined.

So in spite of all of the problems, it was better to be in New York. Such as it was better, for instance, oh, for black people from the south to go to Detroit to get jobs in the auto factories. It was an improvement. It wasn't paradise. I hope I'll put, the night of the riot, the first riot. The Stonewall riots? The Stonewall riots. Where were you? What did you first see? On the night of the Stonewall riot, that was June 28, 1969, it was a Saturday night and I remember it was a hot night with a full moon. I was giving two women from Boston, a tour of the village, a tour of the Lesbian bars and so on, because they wanted to form a Daughters of Beledice chapter in Boston. And we passed by the Stonewall and we saw young people throwing things at cops. I did not know that they were gay people.

And these two women were taken aback and they said, what's that? And I said, oh, it's just a riot, we have them in New York all the time. And we were. I mean, there were all of those riots because of the peace movement and for other reasons, there were always demonstrations against the war. And so I took these girls to where they were staying and then I went home. Well, actually, I walked across the George Washington bridge that night because the buses had stopped running and I was going to see my lover. And I remember seeing that black river and the full, full moon. And it was only the next day that I found out that it was gay people rioting. And I hadn't had enough sleeps. I was in somewhat feverish state and I thought we have to do something. We have to do something and I thought we have to have a protest march of our own. I called the woman who was running the Daughters of Beledice and I said, we got to do this. And she said, well, if the Managing Society agrees to, let's co-sponsor it.

And my job was to go to the Managing Society and co-sponsor. I mean, ask them to co-sponsor. So I went there and I spoke to the head of the Managing Society and he said, well, if the membership is for it. And they were having a meeting at Town Hall and there were 400 guys who showed up. And I think a couple of women talking about these riots because everybody was really energized and upset and angry about it. And I raised my hand at one point and said, let's have a protest march. And Dick Leich was the head of the Managing Society, said, who's in favor. And I didn't see anything but a forest of hands. And he said, okay, anybody who wants to organize that go off into that corner after the meeting. So those of us who wanted to organize it did. And we had another meeting in the Managing Society office during a daytime. And we organized this march.

And it was the first gay liberation march as opposed to a homophile organization march. We marched around the village, we marched past the Stonewall Inn. And then there was a little water fountain in the park there. Marty Robinson stood up and made a speech. He jumped up on top of the water fountain and made a short speech. And then I made a short speech because it was one for the guys, one for the girls. And then I looked around and there were all these people and what we're going to do with them. So I said, okay, we're going home, it's over for today. But this ain't the end of it, this is just the beginning, we'll be back. And that was the end of that day. And then we met again with other people and we started the gay liberation front. And those were the gay people who were in the left organizations who had been told by the left organizations that they had to keep their homosexuality hidden because it would be a scandal for the left that to be known that it was a place where full of homosexuals.

And those of us who were on the left, who were in the gay organizations who were supposed to keep our left views quiet because we didn't want the powers that be to think that the gay organizations were a bunch of commies. Well that was the gay liberation front. We were commie pinkoqueers and the hell with everybody. And why, what do you think it was important that the G.L.F. existed, what was the turning point? What did it do to shift the focus of gay life? What the G.L.F. did to shift the whole perspective about what gay people could do was that we weren't trying to say, oh please let us in the door, oh please just let us be nice, respectable people like you.

What we were saying was we had the right to be who we were. We had the right to be whatever kind of people we were, whether we were hippies or Republicans or anything. We had just as much right as everybody else and we didn't have to prove that we were nice in order to have the same rights that wasps had, that straight wasps Republicans had. We had the right to live and to be free. What charge do you know, do you have an issue or do you want to cut for somebody? We skipped a little bit into the G.L.F. which was terribly important. Going back to sort of where the impetus came from to have a march. I'd love to get a clearer picture of what it was that made you vote in a sense. So it affected, you know, on an emotional level, why then, why that night, why that night, why the next day?

I'll have to take you a little bit back to explain what made me propose that march. When I did the radio show at Barnard College and thought I might lose my job, I was scared because I had to tell my boss I was going to be on that show because I knew she was going to listen to the show. Then I of course found out that she was a lesbian. But before I told her, I was really, you know, worried about losing my job was the first time I thought I had that, I really was going to take that risk. And then I finally realized that I had to do it even if I lost my job because in my heart I had always been raised with a notion about what would I have done if I were a Gentile and Nazi Germany, what I have had the courage to go against the regime or what I have been a good German.

And then there was the example of Martin Luther King and all of these affected me terribly. And what was very important to me was to have the courage to stand up for what I believed was right and not to back down. And that was so ingrained in me. I couldn't do anything else. I couldn't go to the board. I couldn't call the radio station and say, take my segment off. I'm afraid I might lose my job. And when the riot happened and I got the idea that we had to have a protest march, I, as I said, I was feeling feverish and I was lying around on my couch, not having had enough sleep, but I couldn't sleep. And I thought we have to have a protest march. And I thought I might get shot. There were crazy people out there. And I thought I have to do it anyway, because it would have been far worse for me to say to myself, I was a coward. I couldn't do it.

I couldn't bring myself to do it than to do it and take the risk. And what was it about the Stonewall riots? The thing that about the Stonewall riots that affected me was that we fought back, that for the first time as far as I knew, we weren't letting ourselves be carted off to jails. We weren't letting ourselves be cowed and intimidated. That gay people were actually fighting back just the way people in the peace movement fought back. And that was so important to me. That was like, it gave me a feeling of we could hold our heads high. We could stand up and fight back and not be intimidated or feel ashamed of ourselves anymore. That was the way the shame. And that was so important. And we had to follow what we couldn't just let that be a blip that disappeared. We had to continue fighting back and say, yes, we are not ashamed.

We will be what we are. We will be in public what we are. Gay, right wing, left wing, crazy, whatever we are, we're going to be that. We're not going to let you make us ashamed of it anymore. Was there any aspect to the actual fighting back that you personally kind of like were struck by, was it a certain group against the cops, was it something you heard about the riots, what was it? I had been in anti-war demonstrations where there had been violence, although I never got hit myself, but I saw what had happened, I saw what had happened in the Democratic Convention in 1968 with the police riot and beat up all of these demonstrators. And when I saw, when I heard that gay people had fought back, the only thing I regretted about it was that I hadn't picked up a brick and thrown it myself.

I had not known what it was and if I had known what it was, I would have joined in. It was time, it was time for us to stand up, it was time for us to say, even to the cops with their guns and everything, we will not let you do this to us anymore. And so when you think about the young, these young kids in their 20s, what was building up in them? What do you think came to a head that year? People have different stories about why it happened, why it built up in them, but I think it was the times, the times when people were standing up, and they were standing up all over the country for one cause or another. We had people were saying to the world, well, to the government, we're not taking this anymore, we're not letting you draft us anymore, we're not going to Vietnam to kill or be killed, we're not letting ourselves be segregated anymore. When we're saying we're not going to put up with women's roles anymore, it was the infection

of the times that was taking, you know, it just took over, it felt like the natural thing to do at that point in history. All right, it's almost like there's an inevitable message to it. Exactly, it was inevitable, it was inevitable that when one group started and made successes, other groups would look and say, we can do the same thing, we can be successful. And, but it took something breaking out of the jackets and ties and blouses, it sounds like. I mean, there's the aspect of the violence that what do you think that did to the public of war, to the sort of the movement, to being heard? We were heard by other people. But there was the almost immediate backlash, there was a constant, and that's the same thing

that happened with the women's movement and with the black movement. It's not that backlash happens later on, backlash happens immediately. We, a bunch of us from the gay liberation front demonstrated, for instance, as gay liberation front in an anti-war thing, and I think it was Pete Hamill of the New York Post who was a liberal columnist, columnist, called us the slim-wasted creeps of the gay liberation front. When women started, women's demonstrations, feminist demonstrations, the bad press was immediate. It wasn't like backlash happened later on. It was immediate that we were, you know, unshaven, ugly, I didn't shave my legs, damn right. And that didn't make me ugly, but it was that, you know, that we were always portrayed as the reason that we were a feminist and the reason that we were lesbians, the reason that we, you know, did what we did is because we couldn't get a man.

Not that we didn't want a particular man, it was like, almost any man is, if you can get one, you know, that would make you happy. And if you couldn't get one, that would make you one happy, and that's why you would fight for equal pay or decent childcare or any other human right under the sun. It's because you're somehow desperate or somehow, it's a lack of being comfortable in your correct position. I can see about, I can think about it now, the idea of being comfortable in our correct position. The correct position would be missionary position, right? Did you know who Craig Rodwell was? Yes, I knew him. Could you say, who was he, what did you do for the moment? Well, I can't tell you everything about him, I knew Craig Rodwell personally.

Craig Rodwell was, he started the Oscar Wilde bookstore, and he had a really good collection of gay books, and he was public. I mean, people would go to his bookstore and buy stuff, and the cops didn't intimidate him into closing the thing down, and he backed the gay liberation front. He wasn't part of the gay liberation front, but he wasn't scared of us either. He wasn't afraid to let a whole different variety of gay people be in existence. He didn't feel that we all had to do the white shirts and tie things. Did you ever go to the bookstore? I used to go to his bookstore, I patronized it. I liked the guy used to hang out and talk with him sometimes. Did the Oscar Wilde bookstore ever sort of provide a place for you to go talk to people

in the bookstore? Not for me. And the Christopher Street Parade that followed, I mean, that replaced the annual march. In essence, they still go on, what did this event grow into? What happened with our protest march, and it was a protest march, is that it became an annual parade, and it became very commercialized. And we still have organizations in it that are non-commercial. But from my point of view, speaking just as an individual, I find it too commercial, too many bars blasting disco music, too many people peddling their wares. And we have a... Okay, let's... You know, high school books, you know, high school students learn about the Rosa Parks and the March and Selma and all these sort of historical events or people who epitomize

a greater thing. Somehow, the gay movement has not yet reached those books, if you see a place for it, if you see Stonewall, it's... It would be amazing how few people were there, you know, before you, you finished... Is it in high school books, either? I don't know, I was so steeped in the 70s, but not necessarily from the textbooks. It couldn't be right. It isn't. It was just... It was the... Women getting the vote, and that was that, and everything else. Right, and maybe another way to phrase it, then, is, you know, what has Stonewall come to mean as a term, and what are your hopes for how it might help people see history? Are we okay with that? Yeah. Okay.

Oh, no, we're not. Oh, that's really far away. Do you see those? There's microphones, pick some stuff, really, pick it up. Yeah, but... Okay. What I'm happy that Stonewall... Yeah. Okay. Can we ask... I think the Stonewall riot, and all of the subsequent organizational activities that took place, have made a huge difference in how people see gay people. Then the former Vice President's daughter can be openly lesbian and have a baby with her partner, and the Vice President isn't absolutely hung from a lamppost or forced to resign in shame. You know, things have changed in this country. When the current Prime Minister of Iceland is an open lesbian, and nobody seems to care about that, that's made a huge difference.

That struck me as the hugeest difference at one point. This was some years ago, was when the... When there was a gay and lesbian film festival in the city of Tombsk in Central Siberia, I thought, we are actually making progress in this world. So was Stonewall a stepping stone or was it a step, baby step, or was it a leap? Stonewall was a leap forward that made all of this possible. The Gay Liberation Front made all of this possible, not just Stonewall, because the riot could have been buried. It could have been a few days in the local newspaper, and that was that. But the organization, the Gay Liberation Front, and all the subsequent Gay Liberation Fronts around the country, and all of the other gay organizations that grew out of that, made sure that that riot didn't disappear, and that the... no good. What can we do?

No, it's fine. There's really no fumigate in the neighboring apartment with a tear gas. Yeah. No, no, no. We can't do anything. I have to go for a few reasons. I would just... I would just... I think it's going to... I really think she's going to riot over here. I really think it's a bizarre circumstances that I have to be down-term for, sort of. But... Are we... Thanks. There's about the importance of it. Yeah. And, you know, you can just sort of encapsulate, maybe, what you were saying. Was it a small step or leap in what way? The Stonewall riot was a leap in consciousness because... because of the Gay Liberation Front and because of all of the organizations that sprang out of that. We made sure that that riot didn't get buried in history. We made sure that gay people could hold our heads up and pride, and that it happened all

around the country, and that it happened in other countries. We connected with other gay people, and we made sure that we would never be burying our heads in shame again. So, sufficient? It's interesting that the voices that, in a way, that really paved the way for so much change, were some of these, like, art patrons who you didn't want to, like, hang out with and have a drink with. You know what I mean? But... But things linked. No, no. It wasn't like that. It wasn't that I didn't want to hang out with these people. It was that people didn't want me. And the Stonewall was a gay men's bar. Right. Well, I mean figuratively. Like, it was just... It's just interesting. No. It takes many different factions to really make social change. Yeah. I think we're here. Yep. Let's just sit for 15 seconds for room time. It's nice and quiet. Oh, wasn't nice and quiet.

Let them just put the, you know, stuff a cork in it for a little bit. Can you tell me if you're really quiet for a few seconds? Okay. When the Gay Liberation Movement came along and I said, the hell with it. Okay. You know, this is a mistake here. Okay. When the Gay Liberation Movement came along, I said the hell with it. I could thumb my nose at the world. It just blew away the last restraints.

I felt like I didn't have to fit in anymore. I didn't have to pretend to fit in anymore. There was a home movement that was supporting my not fitting in. Everything from not the civil rights movement per se, but the women's movement, the yippies, the left wings. All of the movements of the 60s questioned the sexual politics and the political politics that I grew up with. Question the economic and social underpinnings of the whole society. The drugs, the LSD, I thought the whole perception of reality I was raised with is fucked up. It's totally crazy, is certifiably insane. You said that last line again. Okay. Leaving in the fuck. Where do I have to take that off? The whole perception of reality that I was raised with is fucked up. It's totally crazy, is certifiably insane. Okay.