American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with Lucian Truscott, IV, 2 of 3

Well, let's get back to the right control. You know, it's hard to describe in words how boring Army classes were on high-personal hygiene, you know, can be called biological warfare, then riot control, and usually everybody you, they put you in a room with a company full of guys, you know, 160 guys and half the guys are asleep. Well, what happened was some major was walking by this World War II barracks building where I was teaching this class. And he hears laughter and hilarity going on and he sticks his head in and there I am up at the head of the class.

I've got a big map on the wall. I'm acting out all the roles I'm doing, the Stonewall girls kicking and our hair and curls and all these guys are cracking up and everything. So he stayed and he listened to my class on the Stonewall, right? They moved me into a closed-up World War II movie theater and sent me up on a stage which gave me a bigger blackboard, I drew a bigger map, I had to lie it down on the ground and crawl around and draw the whole Sheridan Square map and everything. And then we raised that thing up and then they brought battalions of guys in, to listen to this class. They brought in guys 250 and 300 at a time. They bust them over from, you know, the first brigade and the second brigade, now artillery battalion and all the rest of them. They all had to go through the same schooling and take the same class at the same time of year and all of a sudden they discovered, oh my God, this guy is teaching riot control. He actually knows what he's talking about. It's funny, everybody is not sleeping, they're all laughing and stuff. So I taught like, I don't know, six or eight battalions.

There's four hour course, I must have taught it, I must have taught like 24, 30 hours of riot control and all on the Stonewall riots, all on how not to do it because the police were the ones that were rioting and the police were the ones that were messing it up. And the gay people, the kids on the street that were quote unquote rioting, were really driving the police nuts and getting away with it. Very short and I want to circle back around to a more detailed walk through the evening. What was the worst mistake the cops made? Showing up. The cops showed up, those are the biggest mistakes they made. That's what causes a riot is when you pull the tactical patrol force and have them show up, then you got a riot on your hands. If they had never showed up, there would have been a lot of gay people on the street saying, I'm out of the closet, I'm gay, I'm proud. There have been probably some traffic congestion trying to get through the mob of proud gay kids and that pretty much would have been it.

The worst mistake the tactical patrol force made was showing up. If they had not showed up, there wouldn't have been a riot. First thing was the police were the ones that were rioting so in order to have a riot, you had to have cops show up to do the rioting. If they hadn't showed up, what they would have had was a whole bunch of gay people on the street after Friday night on Saturday night walking around and saying, hey, last night I had to be in the closet, then I don't have to be. I can walk around and maybe put a little ruse on my cheeks or whatever I want to do and walk around and hold the hand of my boyfriend and say, I'm proud and nobody's going to say anything wrong about it. The police came and said, oh really, we'll say there's something wrong with it, get off the street, that's what caused the riot. If the cops hadn't been there, there wouldn't have been a riot. When you look back on it, the tactical patrol force in the New York City police did gay America a big favor by showing up because they allowed the Stonewall riot to happen and

that started the gay movement and the gay movement has gotten us where we are today, where we're now down to arguing state by state over gay marriage. I mean, without those three nights, there wouldn't have been what's going on today. Let's circle background because now we're at the end of the story and let's go back to the beginning. Sitting with the scene for the riot, you've got a bar like the Stonewall. What's going on with the Stonewall? Does it have a liquor license? What's its connection to the Mafia? What kind of a joint is this place? Can you say the scene? Well, you know, I didn't, I mean, I knew at the time that the Stonewall was a mob bar. All the gay bars were run by the mob and at the time I didn't know why that was so, but since then I've come to understand why it was so. But the mob on the Stonewall, it didn't have a liquor license. It was a bottle club which meant that I guess you went to the door and you bought a membership or something for a buck and then you went in and then you could buy drinks over price

and watered down drinks. That was the way that that operation worked and that's the way, I think most gay clubs were not licensed to sell liquor and it was, I mean, effectively speaking, it was illegal to serve drinks to gay people. I mean, in New York State back then and so, I mean, at least in an all gay environment. And so, you know, with that being the case, the mob raised its hand and said, oh, we'll volunteer. You know, we'll set up some gay bars and serve over price watered down drinks to you guys if you want to come in and drink them and the Stonewall was part of that system. What was going on that night was that most gay bar bus that took places, I came to understand it, happened because the bar owners or the bar managers, the mob weren't paying the six percent off properly.

I was talking about that for a minute. What's the relationship? Did you make it for seconds? Cool. All right, can we walk me through a bit of a TikTok fashion? What happened for the first time you saw something we were going on and who were the players involved and what did they look like and also, like, did you know how it smithed being in there and you'd see more time? Well, I saw right after I got there, you know, the riot was starting, you know, the coins were being thrown and then the bottles and the cans and so forth and I ran into Howard Smith on the street. Howard Smith was walking by and Howard and I, the village voice was right there and Howard said, boy, there's like a riot going to happen here and I said, yeah, and the police were showing up and so Howard said, we've got police press passes upstairs. I've got the keys. Let's go upstairs and get them. We've got his keys and he had an office in the voice and he had keys and so we went upstairs. The voice had two police press passes, two, they had had, they tried, they had, I think

Ed Cox was the village voice lawyer at that time and they had to get Ed to, like, threaten to sue for the voice to get their press passes and they kept them in a drawer up there. So Howard and I got them and pinned them on and went back downstairs so that at least we were identified as press and if, you know, Howard's concern was and my concern was, if all hell broke was, they'd just start busted heads, at least if you had press, maybe your head wouldn't get busted. And so when the riot, we went back downstairs and then things got worse and when the riot really started happening and he started throwing bricks and everything, I stayed outside and Howard and I never talked about this and Howard just, like, ran inside the bar and they closed the doors and they got street cleaners going by. So they started throwing bricks, you know, paving stones and I was standing on a garbage can by a stoop right there, that's the 55 and somebody tried to grab the garbage can

up from them and I yelled at him and said, oh, grab this can, I'm standing on, I want to see, you know, I'm trying to see, I'm press, you know, and so they didn't take my garbage can but they found some other garbage cans, they threw garbage cans through the window and through stones and then somebody got some gas and came over and said, let's burn it down and they threw gas through the, the glass was broken out and there was plywood on the other side because the, the stone wall, plywood it up the windows so that their bottle club and what went on inside the bottle club couldn't be seen from the street, you know, gave people dancing essentially and so they threw the gas against the plywood and they lit it and the cops got some water from inside somehow and put that, it was a small fire but put it out but once you've got paving stones, gasoline, fire, garbage cans flying, you got to riot and they called in from reinforcements and reinforcements arrived and the crowd scattered and the thing about, the thing about that happened Friday night

and Saturday night was as soon as more cops would come, there'd be a concentration of, you know, people yelling and screaming, I mean, at that time it was in front of the stone wall, you know, about police oppression and police bust and heads and all that kind of thing, the minute more cops shut up, everybody would scatter and go down these crazy little streets in the village and come around behind on 10th street and wherever they place and reform so the little riot that was going on right here, they'd got scattered by the police, you know, two minutes later it was back here and the police are looking around and what happened to the rioters and then from behind them is gay power, they'd turn around and there they were and I was trying to remember if I saw anybody's head get busted and I think Saturday night I saw two cops tackle a protester who was running away from them, they caught them and they were going to compliment another cop, hit the guy with a night stick

in the side and they put cops on him and dragged him away and I know people got hit by night sticks and got clubbed and people got arrested and got, you know, for rioting or whatever but that was the only thing that I saw violence and the reason that I didn't see very much of it, I came to find out by remembering and think it back to it was and the time that I remembered it the best was when I was teaching the riot control class was the rioters were better than the police, they got away with it, they ran around, they came around, you know, the six percent knew the way the streets ran, the tactical patrol force didn't, they came from other burrows, they were bustin' on big buses, they didn't know that wherever we place came here and Sheridan Square went there and Tenth Street was there and Ninth Street was there and that you could run around the block this way and run around, run down West Forest Street, run down, where ever we run down all these streets and go around a half a block here, half a block there and there you were, you were behind the cops and

so, you know, that's why there was as little violence as there was because the, you know, the gay people that were riding were faster and smarter and they knew the streets better. What about the parking meter, every parking meter, would you see that at all? Yeah, I guess I saw it, I mean, I don't really remember that, but... No, I don't want, let's talk about Howard Smith, because you said you saw Howard Smith disappear. Can you tell me a reason, I think he said he ran inside, but tell me about that and didn't you worry about him, I mean, here's this ride, there's no one yet, what were you thinking about Howard when he run the street? I was thinking he was probably a little safer than I was, I was outside and when the cops showed up, I mean, and started, you know, the cops came screaming down Christopher Street from 6th Avenue and they called for reinforcements, but, you know, the first cops that showed up on Friday night were six precinct cops, and they didn't show up, one of the TPS guys

in buses was six precinct cops, they came screaming down Christopher Street, you know, there was a squeal of breaks and they piled out of the cars and came running at the crowd with night sticks flying and Howard was in there and I was running in the other direction. I mean, from that point on it became this shifting, you know, there's a lot of the riot that I missed because I ran in the direction that the rioters were running in, you know, to get away from flying night sticks and stuff. And so I would run down to 7th Avenue, turn right, go up to 9th Street, turn right and come around on Waverly and come around behind just to keep up and see what was going on. The only thing that was going on that happened behind me, I didn't see, you know, so, and Howard was inside, I wasn't worried about him, I mean, they had the doors closed, there were cops in there, I mean, I was an army guy, I mean, I wasn't worried about him, I thought he was fairly well defended in there, they had guns, you know, I didn't have

a gun, but there were times that I wished I had one in the next night or two, but I wasn't worried about him. So how did the first night end, you know, how long did you stick around? I stuck around until they, until the streets were clear, and then I've copped showed up to pretty much disperse the crowd and then I was down in the, in the lines, I had never ended at J 11, it was from the post and, and J said, you know, let's go over to the 6th precinct and find out what was going on and how many people they busted and so we went over there and they, I think I found out, they have busted 14 people and, and, and then I went home and then the next day, I mean, I knew someone was going to happen, this one was going to stop and so the next afternoon, I went over there and, you know, they had already reopened the stone wall, they've had signs painted on the outside saying, where are we opened and blah, blah, blah, blah, and then you started seeing, you know, gate power signs. Well, there was an ongoing battle between the mob and the cops and the mob

ran the gay bars and the cops busted the gay bars. Well, I didn't understand that at the time, but when I came to understand as, when I finally moved to New York and started working for the voice full time was, the reason the cops got busted the gay bars was not because gay people were in their drinking, which was the thing that was presumably illegal. But it was because the guys running their bars weren't sufficiently paying them off. So if the cops weren't being paid off properly by the mob gay bar owners, they busted the bar, cost them money. And, or if the cops wanted a raise in their payoffs, they would bust the bar. And what they did in the stone wall that night, I went in there that night after the crowd was dispersed, they took bats and just busted that place up, the mirrors, all the bottles of liquor, the jukebox, the cigarette machines, the stereo equipment, all that stuff was busted up. And in the conventional gay bar raid, the reason for doing that

would be, cost them a lot of money. You don't want to have your place busted up again, pay us another 500 a week or whatever the payoff was to this ex-precinct. And so I assumed that that's what kind of bust it was. I mean, I later found out that it wasn't that kind of busted up. It was a, it was a by squad bust because there was a black male ring being run out of the stone wall where they were getting older, straight gay patrons from Wall Street or banking or whatever. And catch it, you know, who had gone in there to dance with young guys. And, and once they had witnessed them dancing with young guys, the mob guys at Palmaside and say, I guess we have pictures of you or whatever, so pay us off their black male. And that's what that bust was actually about. I didn't understand that at the time. But, but I, I just thought it was a regular bust of a gay bar, which was really had nothing to do with gays. It had everything to do with top payoffs. So they too, Saturday, what happened? Well, I went over to the line said just like, you

know, to have a cocktail hour beer or whatever and see my friends and boom, there it was. The stone wall reopened. The mob was saying, you know, screw you cops. You think you can come in and bust us up. We'll put new liquor in there. We'll put a new mirror up. We'll get a new jukebox. The mafia owned the jukeboxes. They owned the cigarette machines that, that was gold coin industry said had a warehouse or a car mine street where all that stuff came out of. So every nickel, every dime that was spent literally down to dimes went into the mob's pockets in a gay bar. And so they had new jukebox in there, new cigarette machines, new liquor. And most of the liquor was off of truck hijacks and hijackens and stuff. I mean, it was a hundred percent profit. I mean, and they weren't even, you know, using liquor that they went out and bought. They were stealing the liquor, then wandering it down. And then charging twice as much as they charged it one door away at the 55. I mean, I think

my recollection is that a beer at that time was a quarter drink, a bar drink with well liquor was 50 cents. And at the stone wall, it was 50 cents for a beer and a buck for a drink. So it was twice the price and then watered down. So anyway, you know, the stone wall was reopened and gay people were standing around outside and and and the mood on the street was they, you know, they think that they could disperse us last night and keep us from doing what we want to do being on the street saying, I'm gay and I'm proud. Just let's see if they can. And more gay people, more people showed up and more people showed up. And it was a lot bigger crowd. And then that's when they brought in the tactical patrol force that night. How did that like people were acting like I'm gay and I'm proud? What did you, you know, like, specifically what did you see people say or do? They were holding hands. That wasn't going on on Thursday night. Okay. Friday night, it started happening after the bar was busted. I mean, obviously it was happening in the

bar. But now it was happening outside the bar on the street. People were walking around holding hands. People were walking around in outrageous flamboyant outfits and and they weren't in and they weren't wearing an outrageous flamboyant outfit at 11 o'clock at night. They were wearing a six o'clock at night. And the sun was still up over to Jersey there somewhere. And so all the things that happened late at night or behind closed doors and behind boarded up windows in gay bars in Greenwich Village on Thursday night were now happening on the street on Saturday night and happening in large numbers. And the, you know, the presumably, you know, reason for holding the tactical patrol force and bringing riot police in was the dispersa crowd that's disrupting traffic, you know, but really what they were holding in man was they were dispersing a crowd that was doing things that ought to be done behind closed doors at 11 o'clock at night, you know, in bars where they'd have

properly paid off the police so you can come in and do those things behind these closed doors at night in the closet, you know. And Saturday night they said, we're not going to do them behind those closed doors anymore. We're going to do them out here in the street. And the system said, no, you're not and brought the TPF in and the TPF chased them around and tried to keep them from holding hands and saying, I'm gay and I'm proud and never succeeded. You know, I mean, they finally, finally the crowd dispersed, but when it dispersed, it was, I'm gay and I'm proud. Now I'm going home. I'm sleepy, you know, I mean, it's a, and then the next night, I mean, it didn't stop after that. Once it started, once that genie was out of the bottle, it was never going to go back in. Never did. Thank God. Let me ask you to essentially think it'd be nice to have your perspective on this. Are you a street white west point? I mean, you're looking at this very positively. Was the street white male perspective shared by you in New York City at that time, or did you, yeah?

Well, I mean, you know, I was writing for the village voice, probably 50% of the staff on the voice was gay. You know, not necessarily the writers, although they were gay writers, but the classified ads staff, you know, the, you know, I mean, it was a gay friendly environment, you know, it was a creative place. And, and, you know, the, I mean, gay people tended to be, tended towards the creative trades and crafts and professions and so forth. And, and the voice was friendly. And, and so there were a lot of gay people working there. And, you know, the way I was raised was, you know, by my parents, it was, that, that was raised to, to believe firmly. And, if I didn't, I got my ass beat for it, that I wasn't better than anybody else just because I, my daddy was a major or my daddy was a captain or whatever, or I was a trust cot or whatever. I was just the same as anybody else. And so I thought that. Did you also, I mean, are you, your straight male? Yeah.

Yeah. Can you, can you say that? And then, you know, because I was just because I was a straight white male. Yeah, just because I was straight and I was white and, and I was a Protestant or whatever. And I came from a famous family or whatever, didn't make me better than anybody else. And, and, and I get, and I believed it, you know, and my friends believed it. I mean, when the people that were drinking at the lion's head, Pete Hamill and Joel Oppenheimer and David Marx and then these kind of guys that were writers and so forth, I mean, you know, they weren't in there saying, you know, look at the fags out on the street. No, they were like, they didn't think there was anything wrong with being gay. You know, I mean, not that, not that, that, that part of being a liberal at that time was to be pro gay rights. There was no such thing as gay rights. I mean, look, you know, let's get this down here. Gay rights didn't become an issue or even a phrase in the English language until that following week, but it very quickly did. I mean, all of a sudden, you know, right after that and you'll have to interview other people to get the details from it, the gay movement started

that week. Political gay people came in and said, this is a movement now. We can, we can start the struggle to get the right to stand out of the street and hold hands right now. And I was there for what happened leading up to the movement starting. And I wasn't there for the movement starting. I actually went into the army during that time. I messed woodstock and I missed the gay movement. But I got a quick question for you. Oh, yeah. Just a couple of details I wanted because we've covered so much ground. Turn the background. What was going on with the Lindy administration at that time? Are you aware of anything? I mean, particularly in election year, I know. Do you have any skill for that in detail about that? No, I really don't. I mean, you know, what I was paying attention to was like the mayoral race. And I knew mayor. I was friends with him when I was a cadet at last point. I mean, that's another story. But nevertheless, I was

covering his campaign and going around on his campaign. No. Go ahead. Okay. You mentioned. Yeah, you mentioned tear gas and you're sitting in the kitchen. What was like, tell me what the that happened on Saturday night when the T. P. F. came down. I can't remember what I can't remember what time it was. But when they, you know, enough of a crowd had built up around the storm wall that they hauled the T. P. F. in and buses and unloaded them in their right gear and their helmets and so forth and surged as first the crowd. And when the crowd, the crowd was very difficult to disperse. It wasn't going to disperse. So they started busting cans of tear gas and throwing them around. And there was tear gas briefly on Saturday night, right in front of the storm wall, right in there where the highest concentration of quote unquote rioters were. And then I assume from my

own military training and I think they stopped using the tear gas because they didn't want to wear their gas masks anymore. It was hot. It was July wearing gas masks. It's hard reading through them as hard. And then they're hot. And so they stopped around the tear gas and just went straight to the night sticks to disperse the crowd. But there was tear gas on Saturday night. Were you ever scared when you said you were running like a guy? No, I don't remember being scared. I mean, it was, there was too much going on. And I don't know. I mean, from the back around that I came from, you know, I would be scared if somebody would, if they're walking around holding guns, you know, because I know how difficult guns are to manage in sort of uncontrolled situations like that. But they weren't holding guns. They were holding night sticks. And the night sticks you could get away from, you know, and I could run faster than any cop in and then riot gear and so could the gay kids,

you know, they could run a lot faster. And they knew the streets better and I knew the streets better. So I was never scared because there wasn't any reason to be scared. And not like that, none of those kids on the street, none of the young people were scared. I mean, what am I going to do? Stand around, be scared. I mean, you know, in a mob like that, you catch the flavor. You catch the, you know, the feeling that the mob has is that the mob is terror-stricken by God. You're going to be terror-stricken if you're covering it. I mean, covering it is covering a riot like that is not like they set a bleacher up and you get to go sit on the bleacher and watch it from the bleacher and get your notebook. And well, let's see, they're coming in from the left, you know, I mean, you're down in it, you know. And so, you know, covering it is difficult. And I remember it was, it was the previous year they were, they had had a big political anti-war demonstration up at, at, at, at,

Grand Central Station. And one of the village voice staff writers, God, my name is Dominic Neal, got busted in the face with a, with a, a, a nightstick and had a huge cut on his face. They ran a picture of him on the front page. I mean, you know, so it, you know, you can get hurt, but not in that situation down there. Is this speaking of your riot teaching? Can you tell me like, what was your job in the military in your life? I was a platoon leader, an infantry platoon leader, which meant that I was, you know, in charge of about 40, you know, junkies, winos and criminals. That was who was in the, in the military at that time. It was, you know, that being Vietnam was going on. The army was in a state of, I mean, if the Russians ever wanted to attack, that should have been the time. I mean, I remember one time that we had, there was a, there was a big alert over, there was supposed to be a war in the Middle East. There was a, it was called the Jordan alert or something.

And we were all supposed to mobilize and get ready to, you know, go to Jordan, presumably. And we couldn't start the, we couldn't start our jeeps and him one, one, three's, because all the junkies had stolen the batteries out of them. I mean, it was a, with the street kids involved in the Stonewall, were they like, I mean, the bridge in town said, was it a mix or were they like, middle-class kids? There was middle-class kids in there. I mean, I wasn't there, you know, taking names and looking at IDs. But, I mean, there were middle-class white kids. There were Spanish, kids, Puerto Ricans, blacks. It was a wide mix of, of, of young, you know, young, happy gay people. I mean, and, and young club kid type gay people, people that wanted to go out and have a good time. I mean, this, I mean, when you look at this, if you just stand back from the perspective we have now, and look at this and, and think,

what was the crime that was being committed here? I'm gay, and I want to go out and have a good time. Boy, there's a crime. Let's get the cops out. Let's get the T-P-F down here and go and bust these people for being gay and wanting to have a good time. I mean, you know, the movement started on that night to get us past the point that being gay and wanting to have a good time was a crime. And thank God we're past it. I mean, but that's literally what was the offense was at that moment was. I'm gay, and I'm proud of it, and I want to go out and have a good time. And I've got a feather ball on to display it and show you how happy I am about going out and dancing tonight. Well, that was illegal. In 1969, on Thursday night and Friday night and Saturday night, that was illegal. And they cracked down and tried to make it illegal from then on. And, you know, gay people stood up and said, it's not going to be illegal from now on. And thank God it didn't. I'm asking you to be a sociologist. Okay. We're coming out of the end of the home stretch

to share. You'll be.