American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with David Carter, 2 of 3

I think what's creating the heat in New York City among the gay community is two things. One is the increased clamp down by the police in the mid-1960s. The Lindsay administration, when it came into office, under pressure from the local madashing society, did in entrapment by the police. That was the most egregious example of the oppression by the state. However, I think the failure was they didn't carry through. What I mean by that is that the Lindsay administration didn't control the transit police, so entrapment continued there. You can say it's just a great step at this angle, because it's a really good point. Talking over beer?

Yeah. A little less formal. Okay. I know you can do it. What happened was after the police ended entrapment, they didn't stop harassing gay people. They kept on raiding bars, they kept on arresting gay men, they kept on harassing them, gay people kept on being fired. The police would do nothing. You got blackmail. They didn't really care. The police were involved in the blackmail. The judges were involved in the blackmail. The lawyers were involved in the blackmail. It was a whole corrupt system. The cops needed the mafia, the mafia needed the cops. It was a pure exploitation. It was a disgusting system of exploitation, it was very corrupt. It's an example of how you have one bad social policy, it may sound like one simple law,

but then it's like throwing a stone into a pond, it has a thousand ripples. All the ramifications that came out of homosexuality being illegal were very complex and far reaching. Many people's lives were ruined. The night had their licenses yanked, couldn't practice law, thrown out of apartments, pictures, addresses published in the newspapers. The police would go to far island and they would arrest a lot of men in one night. It's a arrest of each one. They would handcuff one to the other and they had like a series about 20 men lined up to a telephone pole, one chain to the other. When they thought it had enough for the night, they would pull up a boat and load those people into the boat, take them out and charge them. It was worse than that because what happened was there was this gay community beginning to form on fire island, another little refuge, not as big as the village, but a refuge. What happened was it was declared a national sea shore and property values went through

the roofs. And then when they arrested the men, they would end up in front of a judge. As they pleaded guilty, the judge turned it in up very idly, buying their property for a low price to get them off. So there was a mess, I mean, there were tremendous crackdowns on the one hand, you're tailed alive by the freedom that they see available, isn't it? So when lit, you can encapsulate briefly. When was the Indian administration so bad, it feels like it was an improvement over a wagon or what, why do you think Stonewall happened under the Indian administration? Stonewall happened under the Lindsay administration because he wanted to get reelected. He was in the re-election and fight of his life in May. You had a whole series of bar raids, there was increased police vigilantism, they were busting gay men in parks, they were raiding bars again.

I think people were afraid they were seeing a return to the battle days. And I think what happened is people got a little bit of freedom and that was intoxicating. They wanted more, they didn't want to be taken back. I think that's the main reason Stonewall happened. I don't know if you were talking to me, but I think it's good for you to go to the administration. Sure. When the Lindsay administration ended in trap mud and when gay bars began to be somewhat legal, gay people in New York City felt finally a whiff of freedom. They thought they were going to be getting better and better, they were living conditions. And that was taken away from them all of a sudden and they rebelled. Let's go talk about the Stonewall itself. Who were in the Stonewall, what was going on before that time, police, and gay men?

The Stonewall Inn was run by the Mafia, in particular Ed Murphy, who was a around a national blackmail ring, was connected with the Stonewall Inn. And the Stonewall Inn was used to blackmail gay men. So it was a very ambiguous place. It was a place of freedom on the one hand for some, feeling that they could express themselves more freely behind the blacked out windows, the closed doors, heavy security. On the other hand, for some people it was pure exploitation, a place where people were blackmailed, it was a place where people could dance freely and express themselves. Most places last, most gay bars at that time lasted three to six months. The Stonewall was unusual in that it lasted almost three years. And I think one reason that happened is because it was the most lucrative gay bar in Manhattan. And it was the biggest pair to the six precinct.

They got more money from the Stonewall Inn than they did from any other bar institution. It was about $2,000 a month in 1966 dollars, mid-1960s dollars. That's huge. That's something that no one has clarified, maybe you could tell, which is before June 27th in that week. If you could talk about the Stonewall Inn was rated prior to June 27th, and was that the ordinary rate, you could typical bar rates, you know what happened, you could get your ID, maybe take a few people down town, you could place out your leave. This time, Pine was coming in to take a bar apart to really shut the place down. Can you talk about that week, what's in there, what's in the dramatic way up towards the big rate, what Pine had been up to that week, or what's the police roughly that week was already selling? Yeah. Well, there was a whole series of bar rates in June of 1969, coinciding with the Merilinsie trying to get re-elected.

Five bars were rated, three of the most popular bars in town were shut down. The last week of June, in the middle of the week, Seymour Pine let a raid on the Stonewall Inn. That was a rather typical raid, but there was one thing, that is, he got flak from the patrons, they were talking back to him, like they had not before. But another thing happened too, which is, he got also flak from the Mafia, as he was leaving, the Mafia manager said to him, you know, go ahead, shut us down if you want to. We'll be open again tomorrow, and that's Stung Pride, I mean, that's Stung Pine, you know, he felt very angry, he felt that was a challenge. He was already under orders to shut down the Stonewall Inn, ostensibly because of his blackmail operation. And the Mafia honor, through that in his face, he felt that was a challenge, and he decided to come back and do a real bang up job on the Stonewall Inn. It was also the case, I think, that, should have lost my train of thought. Well, it was either Tuesday or Wednesday, the exact date is not in the middle of the

week. Last week of June, midweek, St. More Pine does a raid on the Stonewall Inn. And it was a somewhat average raid, except two things happened. One is that he got flak from customers, they were talking back that had not happened before. The other thing that happened was he got flak from one of the Mafia managers, who said to him, go ahead, shut us down if you want to. We'll be open again tomorrow, and that may find angry. But another part of the picture here is that Pine was new to Manhattan, he'd only been transferred there for a few months when he was doing this raid. And I think he was very honest police officer, I believe that about him. He wasn't aware initially, I believe, that the sixth precinct was on the take. And his operation was a different division, being the morals squad. So when he realized that the Mafia owners of the Stonewall, I'm sorry, I have it backwards.

Normally before a raid, Pine would call the sixth precinct for backup and tell him he was going to raid a certain bar on a certain night. But he caught on, he was a smart man, he realized that the sixth precinct then was telling the Mafia ahead of time. So when he would raid, there wouldn't be much money there, there wouldn't be much liquor. It would be a fairly clean scene, there wouldn't be many customers inside. So Pine caught on to that, and he decided, after he got that lip from the Mafia manager, he decided he was going to do a very serious raid. So he made sure there were federal agents there. He made sure he had somebody from the Cabaret office who could incite the Stonewall Inn for any kind of violations under the Cabaret laws, overcrowding, lack of fire exits. And he sent people inside ahead of time to investigate, to collect evidence.

He even had called the emergency service to have them come in and cut out the bar so they could hollet out and hold the bar as evidence. It was a very serious raid. Also most raids by the New York City police, because they were paid off by the mob, took place on a weeknight, they took place early in the evening, the place would not be crowded, it wouldn't disrupt the Mafia operations very much. So this was a highly unusual raid that he pulled off the last Friday in June, and that he timed the raid to be at the peak of operations. The bar was crowded. Even for the Stonewall Inn, which is normally crowded on the weekends, it was unusually crowded that night. Over 200 people in there may be closer to 250. And so going in there the middle of the night, with a full crowd, the Mafia hasn't been alerted, the six precinct hasn't been alerted, it was a whole different kettle of fish. And also that caused a different reaction from the gay community. They thought, what is this?

This is a different kind of raid. This is not some routine raid. And coming in the context of the crackdown that was going on overall in New York City at the time, that's one reason, maybe the main reason, the pot boiled over at that point. That's fascinating, I've never heard that, and that's really well explained. I'm just trying to go down, I wouldn't really need to do a list here. Okay. And something to go lovely answers from. Okay, let's talk about the night. Pine comes in, things start to spiral out of control. What do you think would be an event that pushed it from being, to push back from the community forward line into full blown riot load? There's no doubt in my mind that if there is one event that pushed it over the edge, the resistance in the streets to the raid, into a riot, it was definitely the lesbian

who fought with the police in full view of the crowd, where the police were being brutal with her. She was escaping them, but then she was not going back. She tried to get back inside the Stonewall Inn two times. So the brutality that was witnessed out on the street, on the sidewalk, by the masses, her rage, the brutality. That's what made people furious. One witness I interviewed told me that he was standing next to a friend of when he saw the woman being mistreated like this, he wrenched a cobblestone out from the base of a tree, threw it across the crowd, landed on the trunk of a police car, said, scared the shit out of the policeman next to it, made a horrible sound. And that's when it all broke loose. I think also that Raymond Castro's fight with the police, coming shortly after that, taking place again on the sidewalk, out in the street in full view.

He was fighting so strongly, there were five policemen on him. The fight with him motivated the crowd. There's several people at the same time escaped into patrol wagon, that of the anti. So I think the riot was definitely going to happen when you had the lesbian fight with the police outside. But I think the fight between Raymond Castro and the police coming right after that assured that a full-blown riot took place. You know, the next morning there was a sign that appeared at Stonewall. And what about that sign that put it up and put that in all of that? Well, the day after the first night of the riots, there was a sign that went up on front of the Stonewall Inn saying, we will be open tomorrow. And I think that was an act of defiance on the part of the mafia. You know, they were used to being able to pay off the police and operate with impunity. But some of those mobsters were gay. And I think it may not have been only that they resented the police interfering with their business operation.

I say so. But also some identification with the gay community possibly. And then was your managing society side as well? Yes. Okay. I think it was on Sunday that a sign went up from the Madison Society saying essentially that we are the Madison Society urged that peace and quiet be maintained on the streets of the village. Dick Lightsch told me that when the Stonewall, Dick Lightsch was president of the Madison Society of New York at the time. And he told me that when the riots happened, he felt so many different pressures and different constituencies, some urging him to fight harder. Some saying, no, this is going to cause a backlash. And I think he was trying to play both sides of it. Ultimately, the Madison Society came down more on the favor. The Madison Society of New York ultimately came down more on the side of stopping the riot by putting that sign up on the front of the Stonewall Inn by having people go out and talk to the crowds and say, you know, go home.

Let's keep it non-violent. Let's keep it peaceful. Let's work through the established channels. Do you think that if that's some kind of encapsulates what was going on in the gay community overall? And somehow there was a folder guard that had things that had quiet lives. They wanted to do jobs and careers and bank accounts. They wanted to protect and maintain things. And younger kids, who are, you know, to help with that middle class stability in a, you know, Mr., you know, you want our rights, you want to join the world and read freely. Can you talk about that and turn to Stonewall? Sure. I think so. Well, I think to understand this, we have to really remember how radical the late 60s were. You had students taking over campuses. You had the black panthers and you had the black Muslims saying that essentially the civil rights movement in Martin Luther King wasn't enough. People were impatient at the time in some ways.

I think you had a parallel thing going on in the gay movement where the homophile movement, what we called the movement before the gay liberation movement that comes out of the Stonewall rise. The homophile movement largely believed in working very much through the system. And I think what happened was that these kids coming up from the streets, you know. They hadn't come up through the madashine society. They were seeing on TV every night, acts of rebellion, you know. People raising their, their fist in a power salute. The whole idea, you know, don't trust anyone over 30, taking over buildings. Be yourself, question authority. They were seeing all this. There was nudity on Broadway, I mean, who really cared if some politician and city hall got offended, you know. And so, how did that play in the gay movement? And we were merely, middle class gays were horrified by what happened so hard when they finally woke it up. What was, you know, how did that play out?

I think initially, a lot of the middle class, more middle class gays who were part of the homophile movement were afraid of what happened at Stonewall. They were horrified, they were afraid. Randy Wicker, who had been perhaps the first militant on the East Coast in America, was horrified. His idea of, you know, drag queens kicking up the hills at cops, fires being set. He was afraid a brown stone was going to, you know, catch on fire. And a woman and her baby would be burned to death. And then what would happen to the movement that he had tried to nurture, you know, so carefully. And he'd seen it come so far from his point of view. So eventually, I think, you know, most of them came around. Some of them, some, some leaders in the homophile movement were behind it right away. Camany in Washington, the homophile movement, the Managing Society there, he immediately praised the Stonewall riots. So it wasn't a uniform reaction in the, in the gay movement that existed to it. But most of the older movement was originally afraid.

Can you get, because we've used the word homophile a lot. Yeah. Well, in discussing the history of the civil rights movement for gay people in the United States, we describe what happened the movement before Stonewall was being the homophile movement. That was their word. They chose that word for two reasons. One is gay people were so stereotyped as being sexual, being over sexualized as sexual perverts, as their whole lives focusing on sex. They thought homophile would be better than homosexual. Also, it gave them a little cloak for somebody who didn't want to be out of the closet. They could say, oh, I'm the word file deriving from the Greek for love. Oh, I love my fellow man. And, you know, with him gay or not, I love my fellow man. It also allowed a white people to deny their homosexual while being part of the movement. Great.

How does the matter actually, what do you think, what's the matter of being gay? Okay. When the Matt Ishing Society was founded by Harry Hay in the early 1950s, he chose the word Matt Ishing because he'd been a student of a folklore. And he knew that Matt Ishing societies, in medieval times, were masked societies. Matt Ishing means masked. The idea was that if you played the part of a fool from behind a mask, you could speak truth to power. And it was also the idea that that time gay people needed a mask. They couldn't come out of the closet. See, so they needed something to hide behind, but they could speak through. That's the name Matt Ishing. Yeah. Did you sort of tell me what, again, just normal and not show? Were they good at the Matt Ishing?

Did you have any effect and, you know, what were their problems? Why did they change the world? Right. Okay. The Matt Ishing Society of New York had many accomplishments. They elected a militant slate in the mid-1950s to break a break with the past, some more cautious politics. They challenged the idea that homosexuality was a sickness. They both backed the idea that gay people should have demonstrations in public and organized such demonstrations. That was entirely new. They had a picket in front of the UN in the mid-1960s to protest the way gay people were put in concentration camps in Cuba and the way the U.S. government discriminated against gay people. And they also tried to legalize gay bars. They succeeded in stopping a trapment in New York City by the New York police force, and that was a great accomplishment. What happened after that is that the militants disagreed among themselves. Craig Rodwell, Dick Leitch, Randy Wicker, Frank Camini,

they disagreed and they split up. They couldn't stay together working effectively. And I think that is why the movement, that's one reason that the gay movement after making a lot of progress in the mid-1960s in New York City, then ground to a kind of a stalemate. There was kind of a standoff, a stasis. A standoff between the gay civil rights movement, the homophile movement, and the local city government and the state government of New York became a standoff. And then the state escalated. And people were afraid that we were going back to the old days of oppression. But that sort of explained there's a vacuum of humor. But when I think we're not getting at it, there's not so much humor. There's a lot of people we don't need. They detect the sun. They don't need it. There's a lot of people. They imagine these things. They didn't want it, they didn't want it, they didn't want it. They were doing all these good things. Right, right. They didn't feel everybody.

Mm-hmm. While the Madison Society made a number of... Okay. While the Madison Society in New York City in the mid-1960s had a number of accomplishments, they did have a style that kept them from becoming a mass movement. They did go for a more state style. They did have lectures. When some people I met, when some people who were very openly gay, flamboyant went to their meetings. They were frowned upon. They weren't made to feel welcome. So there were limitations to what the Madison Society could do with it. They're more established and state approach. They were militant, but establishment militant. You know what I mean? I do know what you mean. I've heard a lot of... There were a lot of people worried about that. Yes, yes. That was the problem. They had normal aspirations. They were trying to do good things. But they didn't appeal to the movement.

Well, yes. I think another problem was that... I mean, Dick Leitch, God bless him. You know, he accomplished a lot. He worked very hard for the gay movement. But he really wanted there to be one organization in town. And when people come along trying to start other organizations, he would discourage them. He would discourage people from cooperating with them. From cooperating with them. When they try to start a homophile movement among students at Columbia University. Dick Leitch, discourage Columbia University from doing that. I think it's a really the sense that it might be an action to put in the film. Okay. In the year or two before the Stonewall World riots happened. The Managing Society, which before that had been making a lot of progress, was going to go around to a hall because of infighting. Right. And so there's a sense that progress and stuff. Yes. Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Can't you ever come right now? Sit. Can't you ever come? It's a great old day. Can't you ever come now? Sit. So you can set up the riots that way that, you know, there wasn't no war. But how are we going to throw it on? Yeah. Okay. Let me see if I can think about how to do this. Sure. Well, the Managing Society accomplished a lot in the mid-1960s. Yeah. Circumstance. Well, the Managing Society in the mid-1960s in New York, well, the Managing Society in the mid-1960s in New York City accomplished a lot.

For example, ending entrapment. The leaders began to fight them on themselves. And no more progress was made. They weren't able to legalize gay bars, for example. The entrapment they stopped by the police was only the New York Police Department. It didn't include the subway police. And there continued to be entrapment there. The city wasn't responsive in many ways. I mean, for example. I mean, for example. Sure. How did the average gay person feel? Here we are. Okay, a couple of years ago there was some progress. What's been around, what have they seen? Gay people in the mid-1960s in New York City, they saw that Canada was legalizing gay sex. They saw that Germany was legalizing gay sex. England had already legalized gay sex. They saw all this progress in the portrayal of homosexuality and the arts.

They saw more openness in society. But at the same time, they saw blackmail continuing. They had people beaten up down by the piers and thrown into the river. At one point, after the police had fished out four bodies, pretty close to each other, the police went to the Matashine Society and said, why don't you guys go to the bathhouses? You'll be safer. The Matashine Society ran, they made their lead story in the Matashine Society newsletter saying, go to the bathhouses, avoid the piers. Then the police raided the bathhouse. It's a very next issue of the Matashine Society newsletter. The cover story was that the police had raided the bathhouse, arrested almost 30 men, then they had wrecked the interior of the bathhouse because the owners of the bathhouse weren't paying them off. So people felt like there was nowhere to turn. A transit cop who was known for busting gay men in bathrooms killed two gay men down by the piers under very suspicious circumstances.

One of these men was a vice president, a western union, but the cop claimed that he was trying to break into a truck to rob it very unlikely. So he had all of these things happening at the same time and there was also vigilanteism in Queens. There was a gay cruising area in cute gardens. And people were going there at night, coordinating, using walkie talkies to coordinate attacks on gay men. When the police were called, they didn't do anything. They took the side of the vigilantes. So, you know, gay people were being, you know, there were about eight murders in ten weeks. So gay people were being strangled, shot, thrown in the river, blackmail, fired from jobs, killed by the police. It was a horror story. Hey, when was this exactly? This was happening mostly in 1968, 1969. After the progress made in the mid-60s.

Can I just jump into one phrase that we love to have in a panor? You know, you said in the mid-60s, you said, as the mid-60s progressed, you know, 1969, things were getting worse. Just some phrase like that. Yeah, gotcha. Okay, okay. As the years went by in 1968, 1969 rolled around. Things got worse. There was a whole series of murders of gay people, people being thrown in the river, people having their throats slashed. There were bodies being carried out of subway stations. It was a horror story in New York City. I don't know if I can show it back, but it probably is.