American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, 3 of 3

Okay, one quick question for the record. Who was Jackie Hormone? Jackie Hormone was a street queen. Who, like, I didn't know, very, very, very well, see very few people, you knew very well, you knew people, you know, kind of connecting way, and then you figured out how to get along with them. Jackie Hormone was someone from what I could see. That was fair toward people, someone that was level-headed in an argument. And again, that's just the way I saw Jackie Hormone. I didn't see Jackie Hormone as a troublemaker, like someone who would, like, hit someone for nothing.

Did you see Jackie Harkout early on in the riots on the first night? Well, I saw a lot of movement, but I mean, my eyes are in a camera. This record, okay, this record ties it all together. Now how it will tie it all together, it goes before a stonework, goes after, it goes to, like, the technology of the era, and this is very important, so I hope this tape is really on. This has Moon River on it, which is from breakfast at Tiffany's, but I bought the record in high school. I didn't know it was from that. I just knew I liked the song. Now, the other side is Peter Gunn, okay, that was from the TV show Peter Gunn. I used to play this record for some guy that I was in love with, and I was a teenager. But I would play it on 78 because he hated it, okay, he was, like, Mr. Tough Guy, and but it would always make him smile because it sounded like little, little munchkins or

fairies singing or something. And so to see him smile, now see, I mean, people can say, like, what's the big deal? You're talking about seeing someone smile, oh no, no, no, when you can make the guy you love smile, when you're told you're not allowed to love. And this is back in Linden, New Jersey. You've accomplished something. Now, he never put out. There's no sex, nothing. He knew I was gay. And then this very same type of record is what was on the jukeboxes, two jukeboxes at the Stonewall. Okay. What is it? 45 RPM, revolutions per minute. So you have 100 records on two jukeboxes, that's 200 records. Each one has a flip side that becomes 400 revolutions per minute. So just think it through. Think it through. Everyone dancing, that becomes revolution, there's 60s with stupid sometimes. People didn't see, like, the music you could dance to as the real revolution.

But for me it was, they thought people singing Peter Paul and Mary was the revolution. Not for me. There was those jukeboxes at the Stonewall and us dancing together, and little records like this, these little 45s, this is where you could carry a symphony in your purse. I mean, that's a revolution, that's art and life coming together. So like, I tried to pull that together quick, I could go on hours about that. Did you apply to art school and did you get in or not? I went to, okay, first I went to Pratt Art School, I got in that. Yes. Then when I was finished with that, because I got the reading list left, I didn't have no money to go back, Cooper Union, if you get in, you go for free, okay. So in 67, I took the test for Cooper Union, as far as the test, okay, I get the thing telling me I didn't get in, the unacceptance letter, and then I go to visit my parents

or something like that, and my father says, come down to the basement, and he says, I, that school called me up and told me why you didn't get in. All this had never occurred to me, it wasn't for my dear loving father, and he says, don't tell your sisters or your mother, never let them know these things about yourself. And then, so I went over to Cooper Union, would like, in the next week or something, and I said, one of my scores on the test, art scores were real high, and they said, but you didn't get in because of that psychology test you wrote, because they had a thing called the psychologist, which is a blank piece of paper. The funniest part was in the great hole where Abraham Lincoln spoke. This guy gets up, it was just what a teenager wants to hear, I gotta say it, if he gets up and says, at the Cooper Union, we want you to be yourself, it is most important that you leave nothing out in this test, and because we are going to judge you by the integrity of your person, connecting to your person, or something like that, so I actually believe

the guy, okay, so then I go there, and then that's that, I threatened the Cooper, the civil liberty zone, I said, you get the civil liberty zone after, if I call the civil liberty zone, I love this one, and they go, don't call us, call us a psychiatrist, that's how twisted that world was back, and see, there's endless stories I could tell, so like if gay people didn't take it on themselves, all the nice people out there would just hooked us up for a shock treatment and let us fry, and that would have been it, and my hair would be, I don't know what by now, I mean, because I mean, I guess I'd have curled your hair, because I'd be fried, I mean, but who knows, life turned out the way it did, and it didn't come, it was, the worst, the worst. Okay, I'm going to make sure it's full, I'm going to make sure it's in the bus through

the bus through the bus. That's a nice, more screen.