American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with John O'Brien, 1 of 4

A long ago, and yet, almost Gays were treated very, very differently. What was it like to be Gays then? Well, I was very young in the 50s, and I didn't know I was Gays probably till actually the very late 50s, because I was born in 1949. So I knew that I needed to be very quiet about being Gays, not to tell people that I could not trust, because I know it was going to hurt me if people knew. What it was like is that you were afraid that some of you would find out you were Gays. You were afraid of how you held your hands, how you walked. You were afraid of people you met. If you had met somebody that was Gays, then being seen with the other person in public, that maybe somebody would know that you were Gays and that other person was Gays. And so you'd lose your jobs, or worse, now for me, I didn't have a job at those times.

I was too young. But I knew that in schools, the words were being said to put down people was about me. I learned very early that those horrible words were about me, that I was one of those people. It made me fearful, afraid, different, and alone, very alone. There was nobody else that I had known then who was Gays. And the people that I had met for sexual relationships in these public places, because that's all the places I go to, they were not interested in helping me, or bettering me in terms of my understanding about who I am, or my history. Okay.

Okay. School were all supposedly heterosexual. Everything in school books was heterosexual. There was nothing positive in any way, shape, or form, and anything being told to me in my school books, or on television, or on radio, in private life, public life, nothing positive, and the only thing I kept hearing were negative things about being gay. What was the message of the negative things? Some of the terms, or what was the implication? The terms were words like, faggot, cock sucker, queer, pervert. And then other words, which were in other languages, because I lived in Spanish Harlem, too, while we're going. And basically, it was how it was said that hurt more than just the word itself. So just on the scale of things, I mean, how did Gays stand up to other minority groups in terms of social acceptance?

We had no identity, because unlike other groups, like people of color, they had their parents, and they had the culture, and they had a history. Their oppression was different in many ways, but they had a support system. Gay people had no support system. Their families were heterosexual, for the most part, and not supportive. So there you are. Did you even have a way to identify yourself as, I mean, you don't belong to a group, so who are you? Oh, I knew I was a homosexual. I knew that, because that was made very clear by the society as in, that I knew that men and women could hold hands. Men and men could not hold hands. It was definitely a no-no. I learned that as a child.

So I knew I was the one who liked to hold men's hands, and I knew I liked men, but I knew I couldn't tell people that. How did that not turn into self-boding, or did it, or was it a struggle? It did. It was very little pride being offered at that time to me, very little role models. The only gay people I saw were mostly very feminine. People I could pick out, and I did not relate to that. I found that was very upsetting to me. I was very fearful of that, mostly because I was afraid I was going to turn into that. And that self-hatred was so deep, and of course as a child I didn't know how it was coming to me, and how it was focused on me. But it was societal, and it was constant, and it was at every level of my existence every day. I saw it in jokes. There was occasional jokes on television, and I knew that was about me.

I saw it in my classrooms with students, and I saw it in everyday life. How about institutionalized oppression? How did the law treat me differently now? The sick in the 60s. Police. Well, they chased me. I was illegal. My question won't be in the system. I'm sorry. The police relationship with people like me was that we were their adversaries. They were our targets. They had their enjoyment after going after gays. They felt they were easy to go after, to humiliate, to degrade, to hurt, and that they could feel superior. The main thing for the police department was they wanted to very much feel superior, and their own insecurities. And gays were a great target for them. In your first aid effort, you said you heard your choice. A couple of distant cams, you know, hawks during that. Let me just say, you know, you tell me a vivid story.

Maybe it's a short story, but what were your worst encounters with the cops? How do I know they were so bad? Did you ever deal with them? Yeah, well, my problems with the police started as a young gay person when I was looking for sex, because it was against the law to allow homosexuals to congregate. And so the ones that existed in bars, I was too young to go into a bar. But the bars that existed were rated by the police. There were no gay organizations you could just go to or hang out in unless you had a lot of money. I was a poor, gang gay person. All I knew about was that I heard that there were people down in Times Square who were gay, and that's why I went to, and I found them in the movie theaters sitting there next to them. Then I learned about Greenwich Village, and I made a B-line for Greenwich Village. I was desperately looking for people like myself, and it took a long time to find some safely

who had spent time with me to let me learn more about myself. The only man I met were just interested in having sex, and that was it, brief encounters. What was different about Greenwich Village from other places you lived? Greenwich Village was different because there was one street called Christopher Street, where actually I could sit and talk to other gay people beyond just having sex. And in Times Square, it was not possible, in my neighborhood it was not possible. It was the only place I could actually sit and talk to people. And how about the bar scene, were there places to go? There were a few gay bars. I used to go to a bar that someone else would pay to get us into up on the east side on the 70s. It was a bar which had a long bar and basically a back room where people would dance and couples. And if the police came in or a stranger came into that bar, you're not sure if the lights went on in the back

and people stopped dancing with same sex couples. It was the only bar I knew that you could actually dance. It was welcome that this was later on. This was after I already had met people in the village and had come to know more about gay people. Until then I was isolated, lonely, fearful, and with no support. And I took a lot of risk. I took risk going with strangers. I had sex in very risky places. And that's how I came across the police. The police used to go through the rambles in Central Park. And I used to go there. They went over to along the piers. And all kinds of places which average people wouldn't go to. That was the only places I had to go. How about the scene on the piers? What went on there where the trucks can you tell me about? Well, in the 60s there was basically trucks right up against the water front.

And there was some piers, but very few people went and piers then. It was mostly in the trucks. And these were meat trucks that day time were used by the meat industry for moving dead produce. And they really reeked. But at night time, that's where people went to have sex. And there would be hundreds and hundreds of men having sex together in these trucks. What was it like? Was it dark? Was it smelly? Was it just a blast? It was definitely dark. It was definitely smelly and raunchy and dirty. And that's the only places that we had to meet each other. It was in the very dirty, despicable places. And there we weren't allowed to be alone. The police would rate us still. It wasn't bad enough that we were in these places that were really that no average person would want to be in. It wasn't good enough. They would still comment on our father's and arrest us and grab us and hurt us.

They would not always just arrest. They would many times use clubs and beat. It was a thrill for them to be able to beat up faggots. I was going to ask you, what could happen to a gay person in the 60s who was arrested in New York City versus a straight person? What's the difference? Well, you're likely, if you had a job, your name would be listed in the newspaper that you were arrested for a moral conviction. That they would list your address. They would list where you worked. And that led to you, of course, losing your job and not being able to find another job. Can you tell me, just because my voice won't be heard, we can clear that we're talking about what? What kind of a gay person is arrested as opposed to a straight person? If a gay man is caught by the police and is identified as being involved in what they call loot and moral behavior, they would have their person's name, their age, and many times their home address listed in the major newspapers.

How about the treatment in prison versus the straight people? Well, they had, they had a thing was called the tombs then on 100th century street, and the people in charge of the gay tomb sections were members of Jehovah's Witnesses. And the Jehovah's Witnesses position was that homosexuals should be murdered by the state, that was their position, which they advocated. They normally didn't take part in any kind of government interaction, they didn't believe in the state except in terms of homosexuals. They are, they believe, the government should murder homosexuals, because it was against the wishes of God. And those were the people in charge of the gay sections of the tombs, and they treated gay people with, shall we say, less than respect, quite hostile. You were alone, you had nobody defending you, the ACLU refused to defend gay issues.

I went to them, when I was in the gay liberation front, we asked the ACLU to come to the defense, and they said no. Homosexuality is not a civil areas issue, it's a criminal issue, we won't defend you. I went to the National Lawyers Guild, which is the left wing lawyers group, and Krossman said no, we won't defend you. We could not find a lawyer to represent us. Because you'd be disbarred, if you were known to be gay, you would be disbarred from being a lawyer in the state of New York as well as any other state in this nation. It was against the law to be a homosexual, and to serve in the law field. Did you ever go to prison, and did you, did you ever go to jail, and how will you treat a bit? I never went to jail for being gay. I went to jail for being in the civil rights movement and the peace movement, but I was very familiar from friends with how they were treated in those prisons and jails. I was finally arrested, but never charged for being with another man in a public bathroom.

But by then, things were changing for the better, and this is like the mid-70s, when the District Attorney Margot Thaw decided not to prosecute for such crimes anymore. Maybe just in a second. Millionaires were made off of these gay men who were caught in the wrong place having sex. Okay, so can you, in a kind of condensed way, say that again, what was the recourse for a gay person who was arrested? It depends on who they were. If they were middle class or upper class, they could go to a private lawyer, get them to represent them, plead to a lesser, pay a fine, and hopefully their employer would not find out. But many times, of course, the police made sure anyway by making sure they would go to the employer. If it wasn't published in the newspaper, the police would then follow up, go to that person's employer, and say, do you know that you have working for you a homosexual?

And you can imagine what the employer's attitudes are going to be with a police officer in uniform coming to them, telling them and announcing that they have a homosexual working for them. It meant firing for most people involved. If you were a poor working class like me, you didn't have lawyers. And so you suffered far worse. What were you saying earlier? We were just touching the 1948 thing, and we're talking about how bad could it be for somebody who breaks the law as a gay person? What was the most common, you know, so what was the worst crime for a gay person? Well, it was basically illegal if you were gay. When I was a young person, you were a criminal if you were gay. You were mentally sick if you were gay. You were immoral if you were gay. Here I am 13 years of age, and I'm told that I'm going to go to hell because I'm immoral. I'm told that I'm a criminal because I'm gay, and I'm told that I'm mentally sick. And this is what they were telling young people.

So there's a lot of things to overcome. But the law was definitely against gay people. It was not a vehicle used for righteousness or justice. It was used as a vehicle to repress. It was you can see only one thing in your life if you're gay. Expect to die. Speaking of which, what happened in the 1940s? Well, the United States government basically had policies of carrying out the debt penalty for consensual sawdemy. The last time was in Alabama in 1948. But historically, you know, gay people would have burned at the stake, you know, stone to death, you know, and other nations. It was absolutely a capital crime to be gay, not just to engage in sex, but just to be. And there was nothing there of any kind of legal support system for gay people before stonewall, except for a few cases. The first time was 1958 when the Supreme Court ruled that gay people can send publications through the mail.

My organization, one, which I was president of, fought and won the right in the Supreme Court to allow us to send non-sexual material through the mail until then the post office would confiscate such publications as being illegal. What were you talking about when you're hanging out in Christopher Street? I was talking about, when I spent time on Christopher Street, I was talking to people about everyday life, about friends, but I also got to talk about being gay and who was gay and learn a lot about how many other people were gay. I found out I was not the only one, and I was able to interact with people who were of my group, which I never had before. Did you know the Oscar Wilde bookshop?

No. I did learn of the Oscar Wilde bookstore in 1969. When I became very active in the gay movement, I met Craig Rodwell, then the owner of it, when it was over a Mercer Street. Prior to that, I did not know of a gay bookshop. And the only books I knew about, which I desperately looked for in the library, were all anti-gay. They all talked about gays as a sickness. There was no, not a single book in the New York Public Library system that was for the public's use that was pro-gay. It was restricted. The ones, the few books that had gay themes were in close stacks. They were not allowed for the public. And so young people like me, when I went to my local public library, the only thing that they had available were about the test cases of sexual degenerates. And why they should be burned alive, I guess. It was a very bad message. When you talked about the nature of oppression, was it, did oppression always take the form of laws or external circumstances, or how did it work?

Well, it was laws, of course, were against us. But societal attitudes, the cultures were against us. I mean, it was basically a thing of, if you're homosexual, you're going against nature. You're supposed to be having children, and you're doing everything you can against nature. So you're a natural, and you should not be here. You should be repressed or sentenced to death or eliminated. And people carry that message out. It was not unusual to find people physically hurting gay people, and most people standing around and either doing nothing or joining in or applauding. Very few non-gay people and very few gay people ever came to the defense of a gay person being physically attacked for being gay. So there's kind of a mental pressure on how does that work in terms of living out your life? Well, if you're only, as a young gay person growing up then, the only thing I knew of was that everybody knew and considered that I was sick and a criminal, and religiously sinful.

And therefore, the only thing I deserved was abuse and pain, and if I was lucky, I was not going to get hurt by escaping from people who wanted to hurt me. Did you, there was an ad you tried to place in the village voice? Can you tell me about that? Yes, so when I was with the Gay Liberation Front, we confronted the village voice because it refused to allow to taking of our pro gay ads. We wanted to put an ad in for the Gay Liberation Front meeting, and the voice refused to take that ad. The only thing the voice had done up to them was anti-gay. They had slurs, they had ongoing activities where the only time they were mentioned gays was in a negative way, just like all of the media. But we figured that we have had enough and that we demanded that the village voice to claim to be liberal would accept freedom of speech and accept us having a right to place an ad in their paper offering for people who wanted to come and learn about the Gay Liberation Front. And after the voice refused to accept it, we held a public demonstration in the middle of the afternoon in front of their offices, picketing them.

Did you, what did you think about the Madison Society and did they suit you or not? I didn't think much of them, I didn't know much about the Madison Society before I got involved in becoming a gay activist. I had heard of them, they had some meetings at hotels, but I didn't really relate to them or go to any of their events. I was a young working class kid, I had no relationship with these men and suits who were meeting in the Mayflower Hotel. How about other influences? If you were a member, we're talking 1969, you know, we're Vietnam War, black movement, women's movement, what other kinds of social forces inspired you? Well, what inspired me most was the civil rights movement. I became active in the civil rights movement at the age of 13, participated in a number of civil rights organizations, Chorus, Nick, etc. I went down south at a young age, it molded me, it changed me, I became stronger as a person, and deep down I believed because I was gay and couldn't speak out for my rights was probably one of the reasons that I was so active in the civil rights movement.

It was a way to vent my anger at being repressed myself. I didn't like the society we were in, and this was a way of showing it. So I was active in the civil rights movement, in the Vietnam Peace movement, I was active in labor movement, struggles. Could you ever imagine during that period that there could be a parallel movement for gay people? No, I could never see gay people coming together and organizing and marching down a street or any kind of protest like that, it was something I could not envision when I was in the civil rights movement in the 60s. I was pleased that it happened, I was pleased to be on the first Pride Committee, I was pleased to be one of the people who called for that anniversary march, which has blossomed since. But can you go back to that with a little, like if you sold search a little bit, why? Could you tell me a little bit about why you couldn't imagine a day when there would be a coalescing of gay people?

Because there was nothing, there was no reference, there was no reference, there was nothing to tell me, there would be any alternative to what I expected, which is to be derided and just respected in my life. There was no positive role models, there was nothing there to indicate, there would ever be a positive role model. It was just my anger of I had enough and I wasn't going to take it anymore. It was just my personal decision that I was not going to allow them to keep oppressing me, and if I was going to go down, I was going to go down fighting. So did you tell me about the Stonewall Inn, did you go there? I never went to the Stonewall Inn as socializing, I never could afford to go in, I was never associated with the people who hung out on the sidewalks and the streets. I was there the first night of the Stonewall and the nights after it, but mostly out of chance, I was at H Street and Sixth Avenue where I normally was every Saturday night and Friday night, arguing politics.

It was a street corner like Trafalgar Square where people would get together and talk politics, and that's where I was when the police sirens started and the activity started. And I gravitated towards the police sirens and people running away, I was running towards the action. What did you think, do you remember what you felt? Oh, I was excited that the police again were being harassed. I was very anti-police, had many years already of activism against the forces of law and order, and here it was on Christopher Street, which was of course my secret street where I would hang out later at night. And the police were running into this bar and people were throwing things at them and hurling things at them, and I was just so excited because I had never imagined that area would be throwing things at the police department. Did you?

What did you do? Did you join in? What did you do? Well, yeah, the basic thing was everybody was emulating everybody else. If the person who threw a stone, then you'd want to throw a stone and something else. It was the right time at the right place. I was there, not because I expected to be there, I was just fortunate enough to be there. And I joined in with a lot of other people who I did not know from the parks and stuff, who were just basically throwing things at the police, and I knew instantly that that's what I should be doing. Do we remember we're going to change state?