OutCasting; A look back at the Stonewall uprising — a two-part interview with Professor Karla Jay (Part 1 of 2)

[Karla Jay] Where, by all accounts, the police came in to be paid off by the bar and instead of that happening, people started fighting back. It was a hot night. So people resisted, people gathered in the street, they taunted the police. The crowd just kept growing and it got bigger and bigger. There was always the risk your life could be ruined. That was the horror of it. [Dhruv] This is OutCasting, public radio's LGBTQ youth program, where you don't have to be queer to be here. OutCasting is a production of Media For the Public Good, a listener-supported independent producer based in New York, online at outcastingmedia.org. Hi, I'm Dhruv. On this edition of OutCasting, OutCaster Sarah talks with Karla Jay about the Stonewall Uprising, a series of riots at a New York City gay bar in June 1969. The uprising is widely seen as marking a turning point in gay activism. Karla is a longtime activist and author. She was involved in the second wave of feminism and was the first female chair

of the Gay Liberation Front. She is also a retired distinguished professor of Queer Studies and Women's Studies at Pace University in New York City. This is part one of a two-part interview. [Sarah] Karla, thanks for joining us. [Jay] Oh, my pleasure to be here. [Sarah] Give us a sense of what life was like for gay people during the 1950s and the 1960s. [Jay] The experience varied for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people, from region to region and different races and ethnicities. But I think that for a lot of people, the experience was being alone and living in kind of violence and isolation. I think that the commonality for most people was being afraid to speak of one's sexuality, having difficulty finding other people like oneself, often thinking that one was the only person

to be queer and often many people experienced shame, isolation, feelings of depression and suicide, and had a very not great experience being gay, although there were some pre-Stonewall groups like the Daughters of Bilitis and Mattachine. So there were some political groups for people who lived in places like Washington DC or Philadelphia or San Francisco and a little bit in New York, but that really wasn't, for most gay and lesbian people. [Sarah] How common was it for people to be open about their sexuality in those days? [Jay] I think that people were really fearful. I mean there were some people who are out, but I think that it was really the exception rather than the rule. And every reason not to be out. If you were out, you could lose your

job. You could be fired. You -- if you had children, you could lose your children, because by definition you were an unfit parent. If you lived at home and people found out they could tell your parents and you'd be thrown out. You would be expelled from universities. So all manner of terrible things could happen to you if people found out that you were gay. You probably would lose your apartment or home. I think that people were out selectively. I think people told their friends, they told some relatives, they probably were more likely to tell a sibling than a parent. And people probably knew. As always, I think other people always knew before you told people. But I think that people were quite cautious about telling people that they were gay or lesbian, and certainly people didn't

use the word "trans" back then, or "bisexual". People just didn't say that. [Sarah] We New Yorkers tend to focus on activism on the east coast, but it was certainly happening in other places as well, for decades before Stonewall. Gay men and lesbians were working to increase society's acceptance of queer people. The Mattachine society for gay men and the Daughters of Bilitis for lesbians were the best known early homophile organizations. Talk to us about the early homophile movement and how it developed. [Jay] The homophile movement arose in part out of World War Two and there was a feeling among gay men who developed Mattachine that they had served their country honorably, and then many of them were discharged dishonorably when the war ended. In the 1950s during the Red Scare many people who worked for the government either lost their jobs or they were afraid they would lose

their jobs because they were homosexually oriented. And so groups like Mattachine sprang up to counteract this homophobia in society. And the Daughters of Bilitis started in San Francisco and part of all of these groups had a social function to let others know that we existed. [Sarah] What did these organizations actually do to try to make life better for gay people? [Jay] They had demonstrations, for example at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia every year on the Fourth of July in which they demonstrated their call for civil rights. But one of the things that really differentiated them from later groups was the Mattachine Society had a dress code at such demonstrations. And women were supposed to wear skirts or dresses, and men were supposed to wear suits and ties.

And the idea behind this was to show that we were just like everyone else, that we ate with a knife and fork, but we were different in that. And that was sort of their philosophy to have us accepted by heterosexual society. And that was the thrust of the early homophile movement. [Sarah] Some of the issues that groups like Mattachine and the Daughers of Bilitis were aiming to solve concerned the fact that homosexuality was seen as a mental disorder. Tell us about that. [Jay] They often cooperated with psychiatrists and psychologists in the hopes that some of the more liberal psychologists would do studies that would prove that people who were gay or lesbians were not ill. Because one of the common diagnoses in the 1950s was that

homosexuality was a mental disorder. And certainly it was in the psychiatric manual as a mental disorder. And some frontal lobotomies, which means the removal of the front part of the brain, that was done, probably more on lesbians than gay men, but gay men probably suffered more from something like shock treatments to cause them to have an aversion to images of other gay men. [Sarah] That sounds like something you'd see in a horror movie. Some of that's still going on, but it's much less accepted now because most people today don't think of homosexuality as a mental illness that has to be cured. In the fifties and sixties and earlier it was difficult for gay people to even exist, but these activists were doing more than merely existing. They were announcing existence, or they were trying to. There must have been additional challenges. [Jay] You could not be

listed anywhere. We didn't have the internet. So the way that people often found out about things was through a phone book. And the phone companies would not accept a listing like "gay", "lesbian", "bisexual". Moreover, even though the New York Times had used the word "homosexual" as early as 1926, they were not going to accept an ad for a gay and lesbian organization, nor would any magazine accept such an ad, including probably left wing magazines like The Village Voice. So unless you went around sticking fliers on telephone posts, there was very little way to get the word out. Even after Stonewall, part of the challenge for us was to reach other people like ourselves, in a society which didn't even allow us to

say who we were. I mean, Oscar Wilde and Lord Bosie, his lover, they called it "the love that dare not speak its name", and that's exactly what it was. I mean, you just couldn't even say the word. [Sarah] Looking at those restrictions through the lens of our experience today is sort of shocking. Dealing with these challenges must have put a lot of stress on organizations, making it almost inevitable that differences in approach would arise. During the 1960s, sentiment against the war in Vietnam grew, and a less assimilationist and more radical gay rights movement began to take hold. Conflict grew between the older homophile organizations and the newer, more in-your-face organizations and their strategies. Tells about that. [Jay] Those of us who were in the Gay Liberation Front considered ourselves radical. And we -- not all of us, because we certainly were a very diverse lot, but many people who were in the Gay Liberation Front came out of the feminist movement, the left,

the Students for a Democratic Society, which was a very leftist group on campuses. Some people had been part of the ?Venturemus? Brigade which had gone to Cuba to help people cut sugar cane, and so they were supportive of the Cuban revolution. There was really a diversity of opinions. The war in Vietnam was widely opposed by young people, in part because it was a draft. And younger people, who tended to make up the bulk of the Gay Liberation Front, felt that the point of liberation shouldn't be to get people into oppressive institutions. We felt that there was going to be a revolution. I mean this was the overriding thing. Many of us hoped there would be a peaceful revolution, but

many people thought a revolution was coming, like the revolution in Cuba. We came out of the 1960s, and we felt that you were going to have to choose which side of this revolution you were going to be on. [Sarah] Given these rising internal tensions, it's no wonder that there was an explosion of sorts: Stonewall. Can you tell us about the historical importance of this uprising? [Jay] What's significant about the Stonewall Uprising is not the fact that patrons of the bar fought back. What's significant about that is that we organized after that, and formed a different kind of organization. And that new organization that began to coalesce right after the Stonewall Uprisings, that's what caused a major shift in history. And the fact that we remember that uprising

in an annual march, and which is still commemorated today, that's a significant shift in history right there. And it was coming in a way that was absolutely inevitable. On the back of the women's movement, the civil rights movement, there were uprisings and struggles of Puerto Ricans in New York, and, you know, in the context of this, people have to remember that there was resistance by gay men and lesbians as early as the 1930s. And there were other raids in Los Angeles, San Francisco, there were raids around the country that we probably don't even know about, where small bars were busted. So the historical shift here really has to do with what happened in the wake

of this event at the Stonewall Inn. And the fact that people decided to organize and not break with Mattachine, because what happened after the Stonewall Uprising was a sign was put in the window, where Mattachine put up a sign that said, you know, I don't have the exact words in front of me, but they said, "people go home and be peaceful." And this was not what people were going to do at that moment in history. [Sarah] You were involved in the second wave of feminism. Were women able to make themselves heard in both assimilationist and more radical groups? [Jay] There were very few women in Mattachine. There were some women in the men's group like Barbara Gittings who worked quite closely with the men. But the women worked separately in their own group, in

the Daughters of Bilitis. And so the way that the women dealt with that is that they formed their own group. In the Gay Liberation Front the women were definitely a minority. And there were difficulties around being a woman. We often had difficulty being heard in a large group, in a room. We were meeting in a church basement without a microphone, without Robert's rules of order, in a kind of chaotic scene. There often were problems for women to be seen and heard. [Dhruv] This is OutCasting, public radio's LGBTQ youth program, produced by Media For the Public Good in New York, online at outcastingmedia.org. On this edition, OutCaster Sarah is talking with Karla Jay about the Stonewall Uprising, a series of riots at a New York City gay bar in June 1969. The uprising

is widely seen as marking a turning point in gay activism. Karla is a longtime activist and author. She was involved in the second wave of feminism and was the first female chair of the Gay Liberation Front. She is also a retired distinguished professor of Queer Studies and Women's Studies at Pace University in New York City. This is part one of a two part interview. [Sarah] It's hard to imagine today, but back then it was difficult for gay men and lesbians to even find a place where they could dance together. People danced at Stonewall, but it wasn't legal, and when the bar was raided, the lights came on and everyone had to stop. What did people do instead, particularly women? [Jay] One example I can give you, which is an interesting story, I think, particularly for young people to hear about the Gay Liberation Front, is that every month, the Gay Liberation Front had a dance. And many of the people thought that a dance would be a great way to, first of all get people out of the mafia-owned bars, secondly they thought

that more people would join our organization. Only a few people came to meetings. Most people just wanted to come and dance. But for women, when we went to this dance, the women couldn't even find each other on the dance floor because there were so many men and the men tended to be bigger than the women. So the women complained that there we were and we couldn't even find each other, you know, we didn't even know where people were. And we only had bars. There was only one women's bar in New York. There were a few men's bars, but there usually was only one women's bar at a time. So we told the men that we wanted our own space. We wanted our dance. So the men first gave us a room inside the dance that would be women-only. That was an improvement, but it wasn't good enough in the end. So in February of 1970 we

organized the first lesbian dance ever. There had never been a dance for lesbians. And it sounds unbelievable that we, you know, that this had never happened, but it wasn't easy to put together. Some women tried to go to the bar to hand out leaflets to tell people about the dance. They were thrown out in the snow and threatened. We put the dance together and we were afraid no one would come, so we tried to get straight women from the feminist movement to come. And some of them came to support us. [Sarah] So you had the dance, and then what? [Jay] Towards the end of the dance, about two or three in the morning, when we were cleaning up the dance floor and putting stuff away, the mafia came! These big guys in trench coats, they were about six foot five each, with guns on their belts. They filled up the

door and they told us that we were selling liquor without a license, which of course was illegal, although we were getting around that by asking for a donation for a drink, we weren't actually quote "selling" unquote the drinks. When the men appeared there was a big sound of, you know, there was a rush for the bathroom as women who had pot flushed their pot down the toilet, and I had an assignment. I rushed out the back exit and I called a lawyer to come and help us out. She called the police, 'cause she figured they weren't the real police, and more police wouldn't matter, and she also called the press, because the press with cameras might protect us. And when the real police came the mafia ran off. But by that time, some of the women had been beaten up. So this gives you an example

both of what it was like to be a woman back then in the Gay Liberation Front and also what it was like to try to do something like that for the first time. It really wasn't pretty, you know, to just try to have a dance. I don't know if this even, you know, can make sense to somebody of your generation that we couldn't dance, you know. We couldn't dance in the bars either really. It was illegal for women to dance together and for men to dance together. So the bars, they had, like a buzzer. And when the police came in they'd push a buzzer or something, and these lights would go on in the bar, and you were supposed to either stop dancing, or if it was a mixed bar, you were supposed to switch partners and grab someone of the opposite sex so you wouldn't be arrested. I don't know if you can picture this. [Sarah] I can try to imagine it. [Jay] So for me to kind of answer your question, in some ways, yes, it was

difficult to be a woman, but we had so many problems [laughing] staying alive back then, it was like, the guys weren't the biggest problem. [Sarah] Yeah, I can understand that. [Jay] And the trans people, too, remember we're, you know, women weren't the only ones who had problems. You know, I was very friendly with one of the trans people -- they just made a movie that opened about Marsha P. Johnson -- and there were very few -- they called themselves straight transvestites, and there were very few of them too, and no one listened to their issues. There were only a few people trans people in our organization. There were only a few people of color. And, you know, it's fair to say that many groups felt not heard, underrepresented by the group, and oppressed. I think there were many people within this coalition who felt uncomfortable in many ways.

[Sarah] Yeah, especially with the transgender rights movement, even still today. [Jay] One of the things we have to remember about our lot as queer people is that other groups -- let's say you're Italian-American, or you're Jewish, or you're Catholic, or you're Puerto Rican, or you have an identity. You're a woman. You grew up with this identity, except as a woman, where you grew up in the patriarchy, right, but for many groups you grew up with other people in your identity, with a bond. You may have been a minority, but there were other people in this with you from the beginning. And one of the things that's unique about being queer is that the only thing that really holds us together is that the people who hate us see us as one thing. We have very little in common except

that we're all getting shoved in the oven together. And that's a big togetherness. And I see trans people and gay men and bisexuals and all these people as -- my brothers and sisters. But a lot of people don't because -- it's the same thing as, you know, being a lesbian, and going to an event, and what you have in common with the other women there, except that you're all looking for someone of the same gender, it's a very thin connection to actually find somebody. You have to find more things to glue you together, to hold yourself together. [Sarah] Yeah. Despite all the progress we've made since Stonewall, there's still a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ community, and we still have a lot of work to do. But looking back to the Stonewall Riots, even with the divisions within the community, there was a common enemy: the police. Take us back to that hot night in June

1969. [Jay] Okay. I was not at the Stonewall, but I mean, it was a typical police raid, where by all accounts the police came in to be paid off by the bar and instead of that happening, some change was thrown at the the police. People usually were checked for ID, and if you were over eighteen years old and you have identification they would generally let you go, although there was always a risk that someone you knew might be notified, based on your identification. There was always a risk that even though you weren't even arrested, your life could be ruined. That was the horror of it. But there was resistance. People resisted in the bar. They were marched out of the bar. The police called backup, and, you know, a riot started. People started fighting back. It was a hot night. So people

resisted, people gathered in the street, they taunted the police. The resistance then went on for quite a few days after that. And because it was the Village, people kept coming by. The crowd just kept growing and it got bigger and bigger. It was a pretty big uprising. It was reported in the New York Times and in The Village Voice. And a lot of us didn't hear about it right away, because in 1969, people like myself who were not well-off -- I didn't even own a television, so I heard about it probably on the radio the next day. [Sarah] Stonewall became legendary after the riots, but what was it like as a space for the gay community? [Jay] It was not a great bar. You wouldn't go there if you were a lesbian. It was the kind of bar that was primarily for what we called street people, young people, people who kind of hung out in the street. Bars were not

very mixed socially by class or by race. [Sarah] This is a fascinating conversation, but we're out of time. We'll continue this conversation in the next edition of OutCasting. Karla Jay, thanks so much for joining us. [Jay] Well thank you for having me. [Dhruv] Karla Jay is a longtime activist and author. She was involved in the second wave of feminism and was the first female chair of the Gay Liberation Front. She is also a retired distinguished professor of Queer Studies and Women's Studies at Pace University in New York City. that's it for this edition of OutCasting, public radio's LGBTQ youth program, where you don't have to be queer to be here. This program has been produced by the OutCasting team, including youth participants Ian, Becca, Ari, Jamie, Callie, Adam, Andrea, Brianna, Emma, Charinne, Jessica, Sarah, Alex, Lauren, Dante, Josh, and me, Dhruv. Our assistant producers is Alex Mintz and our executive producer is

Marc Sophos. OutCasting is a production of Media for the Public Good, a listener- supported, independent producer based in New York. More information about OutCasting is available at outcastingmedia.org. You'll find information about the show, listen links for all OutCasting episodes, and the podcast link. OutCasting is also on social media. Connect with us on twitter, facebook, youtube, and instagram at outcastingmedia. If you're having trouble, whether it's at home or school or just with yourself, call the Trevor Project hotline at 866-488-7386 or visit them online at thetrevorproject.org. The Trevor Project is an organization dedicated to LGBTQ youth suicide prevention. Again, the number is 866-488-7386. Being different isn't a reason to hate or hurt yourself. All right, go get a piece of paper. I'll say it one more time. 866-488-7386 or online at thetrevorproject.org. You can also find a link on our site,

outcastingmedia.org, under OutCasting LGBTQ resources. I'm Dhruv, thanks for listening. Tune in next time for a continuation of this interview with Karla Jay.