American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with Eric Marcus, 1 of 2

We're just flat up here in this room, and it's a fun place to sit up here as a face cream. Yeah? Distraughtly. And I'm thinking just, I don't know, for a third time. We're going more the time. We're going to show you what we're going to do. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And from there. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's up to you. That's how you felt. You're much more connected to what everything we've shot and how it looks. All right. Now, I'm going to say we're rolling, okay, just to make sure. Okay, guys. We are now officially felt. Okay. Thanks. So, okay.

Name and serial number? Yes, exactly. Well, you know, you brought it up yourself. The feeling of, what was your personal perception of sort of gay people? You were growing up. Was it mentioned? Were you very aware of this sort of population or not? Growing up, I was completely unaware of gay people, except for one man who I met at a Theosophical Society lunch. My mother was a member of the Theosophical Society in New York. There was one man who wore wig, had a chihuahua, wore makeup, and was very effeminate. And that was what I thought of as a gay man. I had a junior high school choir teacher who was incredibly masculine, incredibly smart, had a fierce temper. I only learned later that he was gay. I never would have thought that he was gay. That was not how we thought of gay people when I was a kid. How could they not have been going for a girl?

Yeah. So, I find this a little hard to believe. I mean, there wasn't a discussion at all in school where did people come out? What was coming out? I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. There was no such thing as coming out or being out. If you were gay, you hit it. You had to hide it. It wasn't until I was in my late teens that people started coming out. And I found it terrifying. The thought of being out scared me to death. What's shaking over here? I think it might have just been a breeze or maybe I touched it not that you hit it. I think I had it. I'm sorry about that. Okay. You know, loosen up. You're just talking to me. Okay. Being out right now is the catchphrase. You know, everybody knows what coming out is. What about them? There was no such thing as being out when I was a kid. Nobody came out. There were no gay role models. There was no such thing as people who were openly gay. You had to be crazy to be openly gay. What was that?

Well, it's a downside. The downside of being out when I was young was that you could expect never to have a career. You could have a life. Your family would reject you. The idea is the very idea of being out is it was ludicrous and people talk about being in and out now. There was no out. There was just in. So speaking of being in, what was expected of you? What did you imagine your future to be? What is being in an American 60s? When I was growing up, I watched how other boys, real boys, acted and that meant crossing your legs a certain way, throwing a ball a certain way. I studied men in large part to know how to act like one, so knowing whatever suspect that I was gay. So we're talking about a heterosexual model here. What's the pain picture of what the American dream was? I had a really good friend who was a neighbor and he was a diver. And so I watched the way he walked.

I watched the way he swam. I watched the way he threw a ball and I tried to do what he did. I wasn't all that effective at it. But I knew that I could get away with it in a way that some of the other kids couldn't. Were there negative role models? Were there positive role models? There was, there was invariably a kid at school who got tortured for being a feminine. There was a kid in junior high school, who I remember. And I did everything I could not to be associated with him, not to be seen with him and I would not act in the way he did. So I kept my wrist firm, I tried not to speak in a way that suggested I was gay and kept my hands still so that no one would know I was gay. So then what feelings did you feel that you finally acted on and were you worried about? It wasn't scary. The amazing thing about being a teenager is that you will do anything to follow your hormones. And at 17, I was absolutely, insanely, madly in love with a college student to live next door.

I would have killed for him. And so I did things that were crazy to try to get his attention. I brought him home one night when my sister was in the house. My mother was away. My sister was in the house. I look back now and think, how could I do something like that? I went to bars when I was 17 in New York City. If I had a 17-year-old and he was sneaking out to gay bars at night, I couldn't even imagine. But I just did it. I had to find what I wanted. We would have a wife and a personal wife, and she would have somehow deal with it. What did the world tell you that those feelings were in their realm of, you know, psychotic, sick, normal? I had the good fortune in my late teens to come of age in an era when gay people had started to come out. When it was possible to be openly gay, there was a key moment for me when I realized in my teens that I was not going to be able to be one of those guys who could stay closeted. I had come home from college.

My mother was there and old girlfriend was there. They each asked me where I had been on this particular night. I couldn't remember. I knew I was at gay bar that night, but I couldn't remember what I told my mother and what I told my ex-girlfriend. So I knew I would have a hard time lying. If you're going to stay on the closet, if you're going to be closeted, you have to be a really good liar. And I wasn't so good. The things, flashes of trying to piece together what the gay was in the 60s, what you want to talk about boys in the band, what kind of thing about lies and city of the night. In general, I mean, historically, what gay life was like for people in the 60s or for me in the 60s. Right. Which? 60s. You know what would be in the 70s for me. So himself or for the historical context could really be it. And the historical context. I guess we're getting back to, okay, the 60s, yeah. So this would be the 60s for gay people. I mean, was it, something that wasn't important to boys in the band, I won't say that because we'll name it really can on that.

There were some key moments in the 60s when gay people became very public and one way was on stage. Boys in the band opened in 1968 and it was a fairly authentic portrayal of what life was like for gay men in New York City at that time. What you saw in boys in the band was a range of different types of homosexuals. You could almost categorize them. The happy homosexual, the miserable homosexual, young people trying to break out. It was a transitional moment. And for people, for people in that moment to see gay people on stage was transformational. You didn't see gay people in their own lives. They were usually the fatal character. But wasn't there something fatal also? What was the famous line? There's a famous line in the, I'll start again. I noticed that isn't this access a little. That access is a little off the sex chest. Just bring that top drop down as well. You bring this down? Okay.

That's okay. Just have more. More, more, more. More, more, more. Okay. I guess what I'm giving at. I guess what I'm giving at in a nutshell is, can you just, like in a sentence, talk about some of the irony of the boys in the band on one hand, it was, you know, helping people go, oh, I recognize something. On the other hand, sort of undercut the celebration of being gay was a little negative, wasn't it, so. In 1968 when boys in the band opened, there was no such thing as celebrating you were gay. So in the, there's this famous line in the show about, I'll show you, the only, the only, last time. It's okay. It wasn't the only happy, show me a, show me a, show me a, show me a, show you a gay corpse. In 1968, there was no such thing as celebrating being gay or being homosexual. So the, the famous line in that show, which is show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse.

It rang true. Lots of people felt that way about themselves. There are people to this day who feel that way, who were gay. So in 1968, that wasn't an unnatural expression of feeling at all. And what, how was that, a reality for people in, let's say, New York City going around, or in other cities, and what were the laws that were oppressive? It's impossible for us today to imagine what it would like to be a homosexual in 1968. There were no organizations. There was nothing. There were no role models. So the only life people could imagine is what they saw in the lives that people came before them. And the odds were, they weren't going to have the happiest of lives. This is a follow-up point I wanted to make. When I came out in 1976, my mother said, I'm worried that you'll never have a happy relationship, because no one knew of happy relationships. If they existed, they were hidden. And that was the reality of gay life. Until fairly recently, your life had to be hidden for a variety of reasons. It started by one of the reasons legal, would cops actually do anything?

Gay people hid because they knew their jobs were at risk. They knew that their family lives were at risk. Plenty of gay people were married and heterosexual relationships. They knew that their lives could be destroyed by being found out. Gay people who were in danger of getting arrested, of crossing paths with the law, were gay people who sought out other gay people in public places, like bars, in parks where people went for sex. So the goal of most gay people, or the goal of all gay people, was to stay out of the way of the police and the law. And did the police treat, do you think, Gay is any worse than they would? Or differently than they would, let's say, other people might be loitering the park or smoking a joint or they're certain, how is homophobious? How long do I take, let's say, this microphone is full of this. Oh, it's something that's not. Maybe two foot.

Oh, sorry. I think it's OK. Which I think is no danger. Yeah. The police knew they could play with gay people. They knew there would be, certainly, no repercussions for harassing gay folks or beating them up. They were playthings. They thought of them as a vermin, and they went after them. The government encouraged them to go after them. They're commanding officers encouraged them to go after gay people. So there's nothing to keep them from not playing with gay people in the most horrible ways. How was the government supported by other institutions, such as the A&A, and how this, what kind of practices came out of that, and I'm talking about shock therapy? Something in society was directed at treating homosexuals, treating gay people as sick, sinful, unlawful. So you had the American Psychiatric Association saying officially that gay people were mentally ill, engaging in homosexual behavior was against the law. You had government officials leading campaigns to rid the streets of homosexuals. So it was an incredibly oppressive environment in which to try to live your life.

And you're talking about what kind of health, what errors this decade is when did it stop? It wasn't until gay people started fighting back with Stonewall, with events that followed Stonewall, that the police finally eased off, that the politicians finally eased off. So it was all through the 1950s, 1960s, that things became, actually they became worse and worse during those years, let me start that again. Police suppression and political, sorry again. The police and the government had it in for gay people for a long period of time, during the 50s and 60s in particular, for them it was advantageous to go after gay people. We were an easy target. And there was nothing to stop them until gay people finally fought back. It was the confluence of a new generation of young people, and growing oppression on

the part of the police that finally led to an explosion. I'll get to that. Certainly later. Do you want to explain what one of the medical techniques was, to explain about gayness, was it considered something curable, was it a disease, what actually was it considered, and what's the cure? Looking back, it's laughable to think that doctors and psychiatrists believe they could treat homosexuality, that they could apply electric shocks to some of the genitals while showing them pornography, same sex pornography, that that somehow would keep them from being gay anymore. I'd like to put a psychiatrist, a heterosexual psychiatrist in a chair, and attach him to electrodes and see how he responded. It's not the kind of thing that you can undo, but at the time they thought it was something you could change. Was there a place to do feel it like you're in a position to talk about the dot show? That's the one thing I don't feel. That's a good one for David. But as a young person growing up, even in the time that I did in the 1970s, people still

thought of sending their kids to psychiatrists. My mother wanted me to go to a psychiatrist to get fixed, and I didn't think I needed fixing. At least not in that regard. The first kiss, first gay experience, did you feel totally weird or did you know what I'd feel like? The first, my first kiss was the most astonishingly exciting and natural thing I've ever experienced. I kissed girls before I kissed guys, and kissing girls felt okay, but I didn't know what all the excitement was about when I kissed a guy who I was attracted to. It's not just any guy, it has to be someone you're attracted to. It was astonishing. That's when people talk about rockets, that's what it was like. It was absolutely incredible. Was there a group you belong to on a political group? The idea of belonging to any kind of political organization or gay rights group when I was

a teenager was terrifying. It was a gay student group at my college, but I convinced one of my friends to go with me because I said I had a friend who was gay. I just wanted to meet other gay people. The idea of belonging to an organization where you marched around proudly proclaiming the fact you were gay, it wasn't something that appealed to me or a lot of other people. What about the Managing Society? Can you talk about that as an organization, right, not separate community, or experience before they? Yeah. And how do they operate? The Managing Society. Sure. And, you know, since it will end up being, you know, we can't go in. Might have a little stuff ahead of our way. Can't go. Rolling? Okay. Who are they? The Managing Society was founded by eight guys in Los Angeles in 1950. And they literally met in a space with the blinds drawn.

They were afraid that the FBI was following them. The FBI wasn't following them then. The FBI was following them later. So they had reason to be fearful. Over time, the Managing Society grew into a larger organization, a national organization with all kinds of chapters and different cities, still modest by the standards of today. Many people speak about the Managing Society as if it were some sort of a combinationist, a simulationist organization. But they were operating in a time when there was really no hope or expectation that the world could be changed. So they had reasons to move slowly, to be fearful. So they... I'm still a little confused with either the first, the only domain. The Managing Society was the first gay rights organization founded in 1950 by eight men in Los Angeles. One of whom was Rudy Gernreich, who's the guy who designed, went on to design the topless bathing suit, who's always identified as R, just by the initial R because he was afraid of being deported.

The guys who joined Managing early on almost all took pseudonyms because they were afraid of being found out. It was the first organization here in the United States. There were previous movements in Germany. I'm not answering your question. Okay, that's okay. The Jack and Todd, was it... I like your point about... You know, you were... You were just saying that they had real ways to fit in on to be different, they must have felt different. What did they envision the future of? There was always tension within the organization, within... There was always tension within the Managing Society between those guys who wanted to fit in and those guys who wanted to change the world. The guys who wanted to fit in had reason to want to fit in. They wanted to have lives. They didn't want to spend their time in jail. They knew that if they were more public about who they were, that they couldn't have normal lives. Doctors, was there a similar lesbian organization? Five years after the Managing Society was founded, there was an organization founded in San Francisco called the Daughters of Beletus. But it was years before the two organizations discovered that they existed. People lived in isolation in a way then that we find very hard to understand or imagine.

There were also lots of tension... There was lots of tension between the men and the women, the two different organizations. The women were always complaining about the men getting themselves in trouble because as they called it, they're bad bathroom habits because men would seek out other men in public bathrooms or in parks and they'd get arrested. The women didn't do that sort of thing. So the men were always getting in trouble and the men's groups were very focused on legal issues, stopping police harassment. The women generally didn't have this problem except in the bars. Then jumping to 1969, what was the tenor of the time and how would a, why would a kid let's say from Ohio really come to the village? There were articles published in the 1960s about gay people and where gay people were and people who were members of the gay organizations would laugh about it because the newspaper might claim, well, there are 100,000 homosexuals in Miami Beach and what that telegraphed to homosexuals all over the country was, oh my god, there are homosexuals in Miami Beach,

I'm leaving Ohio and I'm going to Miami or LA or New York. The goal, if you were gay, was to, in those days, was to go someplace where there were other gay people. And what was the, what did the village symbolize? Greenwich Village in New York symbolized the Holy Land for gay people. Whenever gay people were written about in the press, Greenwich Village was invariably mentioned. So if you were living in Milwaukee or living in Queens in New York, you went to the village looking for gay people. It was Christopher Street in the village and whether or not you joined any kind of organization which most people didn't, it's where you went to find other people like yourself. And do you think that some of these people, even if they weren't overtly political, that there would be influence by, you know, other civil rights groups struggling all around the country. What I found remarkable is that the police never changed their tactics.

They just assumed that gay people weren't noticing what was going on in the world around them, the civil rights movement, the women's movement. They were riots, they were protests. Did they really think that gay people weren't going to be influenced in some way by that? So they went on behaving as they always had. They were not expecting that gay people would eventually say enough. And speaking of which, I guess the riots, we did, we, um, go back to what the magazine did, but through a different lens, um, there's this, I'll put it as a question. Was the Stonewall Priet, I believe the birth of the gay, of the kitchen, right? No, but they'll bring it back to, there were organizations before, such as, um, that's what I'm thinking of, do you know, you know, you know, and could you talk about the magazine's deciding dollars of politeness in a way that sort of debunks the myth that Stonewall riots were the beginning of everything? Sure.

Um, what have the Stonewall riots come to people? For a lot of people, the Stonewall riots signify the birth of the gay rights movement. And what most people don't recognize is that there was a movement that existed beginning in 1950, and that if not for the movement that existed before Stonewall, there wouldn't have been a lasting impact that came out of the riots, because it was those old organizations that organized protests right after the Stonewall riots. There was a place for people to go. There were people who understood how things worked, but those organizations were ultimately swept away in the new militant era that came out of Stonewall. Do you personally think the militancy was a critical ingredient? There was this tension in the gay rights movement between, sorry, let's go. There was tension in the gay rights movement before Stonewall, between those people who wanted to be more militant, follow the civil rights movement, um, be less nice, and those people

who want to be nice and fit in. Um, what happened with Stonewall is the people who wanted to be nice and fit in were swept away. The people who took over a younger generation, they believed that the only way we were going to win rights was through militancy. And they were ultimately right for a time, because that shifted again, too. Okay, let's talk about the militancy, um, was it a peaceful riot, was it a, was it a big loud shout that shook the world, you know? Stonewall? Yeah. In the scheme of things, if you look at the riots that were going on during that period, Stonewall wasn't that big a riot. What made it special was that these were not the people who were supposed to riot. These are our fags, these are homos, these are the, these are pansies. They run from the police, but they did just the opposite. They ran up to the police and challenged them. That was what was astonishing. It wasn't like Chicago in 68, it wasn't the city's burning. It was, it was the fact that it was gay people fighting back.

If there's one thing that I think will last well beyond the actual story of what happened at Stonewall, it is this idea that gay people fought back. Gay people up until that point were thought of as the, they were fearful, they coward. They were embarrassed and ashamed. And Stonewall blew things open here in New York, um, and eventually that word spread over time. Was it report match?