American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with William Eskridge, 2 of 3

How about the top of the bottom, does that hurt, does that hurt, does that hurt, does it hurt? Well, in the United States and particularly in California, gay people who were sentenced to medical institutions because they were found to be sexual psychopaths, were subjected sometimes to sterilization, occasionally to castration, sometimes to medical procedures such as lobotomies which were felt by some doctors to cure homosexuality and other sexual diseases. They were also subjected to experimental medical drugs such as the drugs that induced the experience of drowning, in other words a pharmacological version of waterboarding. In the United States, more than two-thirds of the states had laws that involuntarily subjected sex offenders, particularly homosexuals, to involuntary medical detainment if they were found to be sexual psychopaths.

Thousands of people were detained each year in the 1940s and the 1950s. The number had dropped by the 1960s and this was never a major undertaking in the state of New York, but elsewhere it was a primary means of controlling and treating homosexuality. I mean, is there any other group that suffered in any way besides slavery? How does this fall in terms of the dark history of American civil rights? The state's reign of terror against homosexuals in the 50s and the 60s has few parallels in human history. Certainly the apartheid period, persecuting and brutalizing African Americans is a striking parallel. Another parallel is the regime in place in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. Virtually identical laws and policies were in place in Nazi Germany, persecuting homosexuals in the 1930s and 40s, as we had in New York City and New York State in the 1950s and the 1960s.

So, in the long term, the Stonwell riots. What was the news, do you think, that this legal apartheid created on people in this part? The Stonwell riots in June of 1969 came at a central point in the history of gay people and their relationship to the state. On the one hand, you had a brutal regime in place that was extremely anti-homosexual and that affected thousands of people each year. On the other hand, gay people themselves were coming to the realization and the acceptance of their own sexuality and believed themselves that they were normal and deserved to be treated the same as other citizens.

This produced an enormous amount of anger within the lesbian and gay community in New York City and in other parts of America. And what you see in the Stonwell riots is the bumping up of the state's repressive regime against a rising tide of gay sensibility that gay is good and should not be buzzed. The gay is good. The New York State had an 1845 statute that made it a crime in the state to masquerade. That statute was still enforced as amended in the 1960s and was applied by the police to arrest lesbians, gay men, and cross-dressers for dressing the attire of the opposite sex.

So a law that was actually intended to address things like the KKK and others who were hiding their identity to commit crimes was overwhelmingly used in the 1960s to go after gender benders who did not dress in the appropriate attire. That's one of those things that are too much to believe on one. So the circle around it maybe seems to be like that. You mentioned in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, there was an analogy between the law and homosexuals retreated and explained that a little bit with the parallel in the 1930s. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany passed a whole series of anti-homosexual measures. The crime against nature, though only involving men, was already a crime when the Nazis took power in Germany. But other disabilities were added by the Nazis, including detention for medical treatment, including the discharge from employment, including non-service in the military,

including aggressive prosecution of solicitation and crime against nature statutes. So in other words, Nazi Germany in the 1930s engaged in the same kind of anti-homosexual legal crusade that New York did in the 1950s and the 1960s. And indeed, the New York crusade was more aggressive against lesbians than the Nazi crusade had been, partly because of the masquerade law which had been interpreted to make cross-dressing illegal. So in a very real way, the laws in the United States, and particularly in New York, were a pink echo of the gay codes of Nazi Germany, and that indeed is the closest analogy legally to what gay people faced in New York in 1969. The biggest differences between the Nazi anti-homosexual codes and the one in New York were that the code in New York was not as draconianly enforced. People usually did not go to prison for very long in New York, whereas they did in Germany.

And no one was executed in New York for homosexual conduct in the 1950s and 60s, whereas they were in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. We can do that one again if you like, if there was static. You want to do it again? History changes, moves in ways that are unpredictable. One person was at the Stonewall. Nobody went down to the Stonewall on June 27th to make history.

But it did change on June 27th. Gay people in June of 1969 were angry. They were angry at the shame they were told by the state to feel for being homosexual when they no longer felt that shame. They were angry that they were considered outlaws by the state when they were in fact decent citizens. Gay people were very angry because the laws against them were enforced very arbitrarily and very corruptly by the police. Gay people were angry in 1969. And when the state in 1969 would episodically enforce its laws, they were no longer being met by fearful homosexuals. They were being met by openly gay men and lesbian citizens.

And the citizens whose biggest anger was actually reserved for the closet and for one another. No longer in 1969 were a lot of gay men and lesbians willing to cower in the closet. They wanted to come out of the closet. They wanted to be openly gay or lesbian. And they were willing to defy the state to do so. Gay and lesbians were empowered in the 1960s by a number of things. One of them of course was the civil rights movement. Gay people went through a similar process that African-American people went through. In each case society told a worthy group of citizens that you're degraded and degenerate. In each case the citizens came to a different conclusion and indeed formed a certain amount of anger that they were being lied to by the state and the state was denigrating them unfairly because of these lies. So gay people were very much empowered by the civil rights movement which had a number of judicial and legislative successes by the 1960s. The hallmark in America became equal treatment rather than discriminatory treatment.

And gay people felt that they were entitled to the same kind of dignified equality that African-Americans had been successfully seeking. Actually there is one other thing you might want to add. Another reason that gay people were emboldened to assert their normal identity was that medical thinking had changed in the 1960s. In the period before the 60s the overwhelming number of medical authorities said that homosexuality was a metal defect, maybe even a form of psychopathy. By the 1960s a number of leaders of the medical and medical health profession such as Dr. Evelyn Hooker had come out publicly for the proposition that homosexuality was normal, that homosexuality was not a malignant defect. And then indeed the malignant defect was homophobia. That was endorsed in the same time that Stonewall was occurring by a report by the National Institute on Metal Health, chaired by Dr. Hooker.

This report in 1969 found that homosexuality was not a medically determinal defect but that homophobia was. So with the support of medical professionals gay people also had objective evidence that it was the persecuting state and not the gay people who were crazy. Gay people in New York in the 1960s who came to the conclusion that theirs was not a shameful condition, that indeed homosexuality was normal and natural. Because people lived happier lives, transformed themselves, and the people who took the further step of coming entirely out of the closet to their friends, their families, their employers felt even more liberated, free to be who God created them to be.

And that was a lot of what gay liberation was all about in 1969. It was people coming to terms with their own sexuality and rejecting the lies that had been told by the state and then announcing that conclusion to their friends and indeed to the public. Even today, a generation after Stonewall, people who come to believe that they are lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgendered, are often feel a sense of shame when they're growing up, either from their church or their family or occasionally from the state. They come to terms with the wrongness and the lies of that shame and they come to accept their own sexuality and come to terms with it.

It enables them to be functional citizens, it enables them to live happier lives and it is liberation, gay liberation occurs in each human being when he or she comes to terms with her minority sexuality. Turning back to clock again in the 60s. Why would a place like Stonewall be such an icon? What would a gay bar mean in social culture? In the culture of outlaws that you had established by the state in the 1960s, lesbians and gay men could not engage in normal social and political activities. This was barred in most state venues and it was always the risk of prosecution or arrest. Much of the socialization of gay people in the 60s was in bars. Now bars were prohibited from becoming dens of homosexuality and indeed could lose their bar licenses unless they paid the appropriate sums to the regulators or to the police.

So even the places of socialization for gay people were always contingent. They could be closed down by the state at any point. More they could be rated at any point and gay people subjected to humiliating searches, interrogations, brutalization and even a trip in the paddy wagon to the station for possible arrest. So the irony of the 1960s was that the bars became the great sitis, not only of socialization but of consciousness formation, that notwithstanding the city nature of most of the bars, notwithstanding the harassment that you were subjected to there, notwithstanding the illegality of your even congregating there. The bar scene in New York City was one where everybody around you was like you. You were surrounded by gay people and you were surrounded by a lot of gay people who accepted their sexuality and it was the beginning of a role model for many people.

So as odd as it might sound, a city bar like the Stonewall rated by the police was a crucible for gay consciousness racing throughout the 1960s. There might be that Obama and change comes from the bottom up. Is that when I refer to Obama, is there some historical lessons you learned about that you think about how history changes? History changes from the bottom up. History does not change by presidential proclamations or congressional statutes. History changes when people's experiences and consciousness change. The anti-homosexual culture war of the 50s and 60s came about because traditionalist felt that it was important to purge public spaces of the emerging lesbian and gay subculture.

Likewise, history changed in the opposite direction when lesbians gay men bisexuals and transgendered people in the 1960s rejected the shaming that the state insisted upon, seized upon the idea that they were normal and that the state was crazy and insisted to the state that they received the same equal and dignified treatment given other citizens. In one place, you can find that courage is to walk, to find your peers, their rhetoric, history. Isn't that a fair statement? Gay men and lesbians in the 1960s who were searching for a new consciousness, searching for an acceptance of their own sexuality, founded in the bar culture in New York City and other venues. It was only in the bar culture where you could go and be surrounded by lesbians gay men, people who either felt the same way you did or at least understood it. It is ironic that in New York City, the CD bars, many of them mafia owned, all of them subjected to arbitrary police raids and brutalization.

Nonetheless, it was in these bars that a new gay consciousness, a consciousness of homosexuality is nothing to be ashamed of, a consciousness where gay is good, gay is normal and it's homophobia that is the social problem. It's where this consciousness arose and this consciousness revolutionized America starting in 1969. I hope some of this is. How am I circling back in a catch for a minute? I did a lot of great things for a big gay and a big module. That may be not a lot for some.

What was his role in, or do you know about this in the New York City crackdowns of the 60s? Ed Koch has played a shifting role in gay rights in New York City. In the mid 1960s, Ed Koch was a leader of the Democratic Party in Greenwich Village. He was later a member of the City Council and later a U.S. congressman. In the mid 60s, Ed Koch was not a protector of the gay and lesbian minority, indeed he was a leading persecutor. Koch was the spokesperson for many traditional families who protested about the increasing public presence of gay men and lesbians in Greenwich Village in the mid 1960s. Ed Koch personally lobbied and pressured both the Wagner and the Lindsey administrations and their police departments to crack down the open display of homosexuality. Koch openly called for increased deployment of police resources in Greenwich Village to clean up the village of openly gay men soliciting other men for sexual activities.

Later on, Ed Koch supported gay rights. But like many politicians, he was very responsive to constituent pressures both ways. You mentioned the R-word that was vision explored. What do you think about how Ed Koch portrayed his own path to the death? Most politicians are historical revisionists. Ed Koch is no exception to this general rule. Today, almost all Americans accept gay men and lesbians as at least tolerable citizens and increasing number of Americans consider gay men and lesbians equal citizens with everybody else. And former Mayor Koch is cognizant of this reality and highly responsive to it.

However, that was not his stance in the 1960s when the gay and lesbian minority was much more discriminated against, had very few defenders in public culture. And Koch was not a defender of gay and lesbians in public culture. He was a major critic and a major advocate of public crackdowns, of open displays, of homosexuality and solicitation. I think I'm calling what we're planning to do. Can we come to doing that about all types of issues, you know, and you know all about that? And then we continue to get to the death alone, you know, and then we continue to do that. The expressionary about gay people. I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is.

What do you think we're divorcing? Yeah, now David is the one you probably should talk to about, like, what happened on this day, on this day, on this day. But I can give a general answer, and then you can use it as you like. Okay, so you asked questions. What was the gunpowder? What was the trigger that set this off? The gunpowder that ignited the Stonewall riots in June of 1969, were a combination of several things. Oh, okay. I was gravitating over toward you. That's right. I was just gravitating there. So let me start over. In 1969, New York City was a powder keg ready to blow up.

Here's what ignited the powder keg in June of 1969. One was the rising sensibility among gay people that homosexuality was not shameful and that gay people were honorable citizens. A second was continued state persecution of gay people, continued state pressure, urging that homosexuality was shameful. And third was increased police crackdowns, particularly on gay bars and on public solicitation by gay men. This was in response to various political pressures and anxieties by traditional citizens about the increasing evidence of the gay and lesbian subculture in New York City. The event that triggered it, of course, was the Stonewall raid and the response of gay men, lesbians, drag queens, dikes and others who responded to the police on those fateful nights. I think you got a lot to say. Good. He mentioned the very word in the context of the crime.

Isn't it strange? Do you find it strange? Here in New York City, the gay mechanism liberal, do as you please bohemian village capital of the United States, arguably the world. And yet it has the most among the most oppressive theories of law, anti gay law on the books of being poor. How do you recognize it? How do you find it? How do you hold that together in your life? It is deeply ironic that in the late 1960s, New York was a center for the bohemian lifestyle and people of all sexualities flocking to New York. Yet it was also arguably the most repressive part of the United States in the enforcement of the anti-homosexual laws. So it's ironic the explanation is that gay people were a source of anxiety and the more gay people there were, the more traditionalists wanted to climb down.

Gay people were not powerful enough politically because of the regime of the closet to prevent the climb down. And so you had a series of escalating skirmishes in 1969 between gay people and the anti-homosexual police state. Eventually, something was bound to blow. And as it turned out, it was the Stonewall riots of June 1969 that ultimately blew the lid off of this seething culture. I mean, how much political power would a gay constituency have? What could a politician run on a gay platform? And what did it mean to talk about being gay and politics? In 1969, it was virtually impossible in New York City, even liberal New York City, to run on a platform even urging toleration for gay people, much less acceptance of gay people. It was much easier to run on a platform, urging the cleanup of public spaces against polluting homosexuals, and indeed most politicians either ran on such a platform or acquiesced in such a platform.

The reason that gay people were politically radioactive was that many Americans and many New York City residents were very threatened by the gender bending and the sexual variety that homosexuals represented. And yet gay people themselves were almost entirely closeted, at least publicly, and therefore you didn't even know how many gay constituents you had, and they were afraid even to lobby on their own behalf in most of the 1960s. Why did the existence of white people with the homosexuals prove threatening to be kind of all Americans? Gay people in the 50s and 60s were threatening to many straight Americans on number of levels. One is violation of gender roles. Many Americans strongly believed in the natural difference between men and women, and that natural difference was instantiated by the sexual function of a penis in a vagina, deeply connected with traditional gender attitudes.

Gay people were a challenge to that, at the same time that feminists were raising different challenges. Secondly, gay people in America have always been demonized as sexually predatory, particularly predatory toward children. Gay people have been demonized as anti-family, and so for many Americans, including liberal Americans in the 1960s, the rise of openly gay and lesbian subcultures were a threat to the family, and indeed a threat to sexual stability itself in the United States. And then finally, gay people were considered an assault on convention and an assault on traditional values. Gay people were considered inconsistent with God. They were considered by some Americans inconsistent with public health. They were considered by some Americans inconsistent with apple pie.

And so for all of these reasons, a number of New York City people, married people many of them, liberals many of them, considered the rise of a public gender bending and sexually minority subculture to be a deep threat to themselves and more importantly to their children. Great. What is the violence in Stonewall uprising due to that paradigm? The Stonewall riots in June of 1969 destroyed the old paradigm. An old paradigm where gay people hovered in the closet and where straight people were empowered to persecute gay people arbitrarily and without any public justification. After 1969, thousands of gay people streamed out of their closets. These people became politically very active. They became part of the public culture, often an unruly part.

And straight people for the first time in American history had to justify homophobia and had to justify anti-homosexual policies. Those justifications have ed and diminished over time. Those justifications have become an important part of American political debate, a debate that was transformed by Stonewall. We can never go back to the epoch before June of 1969.