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

i spent a whole life in this struggle. what i really wanted to have a why writing have gone all the marches and all of our struggle, was i wanted people to look at my first book and say, was there ever a time that people treated other people like this? 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 outcasting media dot org. hi. I'm druve?. 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 nineteen sixty nine. 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's also a retired distinguished professor of queer studies and women's studies at pace university in

New York city. this is part two of a two-part interview both parts are available on our website, outcastingmedia.org. Karla, welcome back to outcasting. Oh, my pleasure to be here. When we left off last time, we were talking about the early activism by the Mattachine society for gay men and the daughters of Bilitis for lesbians in the fifties and sixties. we also discussed the stonewall uprising itself. Let's turn now to what happened immediately afterward. Those of us who were radical got together and formed what became the gay liberation front. you know, people start meeting as soon as a few days later. the gay liberation front was more radical from the beginning, and so were many of the groups that followed. what did those who favored a less radical approach do? if you were a conservative gay or lesbian person, they saw this as a -- as I said, they posted a sign telling people to more or less behave yourself and go home. and don't do this. they saw this

kind of behavior as giving homophiles -- they didn't use the word "homosexual", even, they used the word "homophile", which means a lover of same sex lover people [laughing], you know, something like that, a bad name. so there was a, probably, an entire range of reactions to this event. i think people were thrilled, people might have been horrified. there was probably an entire range of reactions. before the uprising, there had been debate between various factions over whether to stick with the moderate assimilationist approach, or to take a more radical approach. so it makes sense that the riots were controversial within the community. Did you see a change in the style of gay activism? yes. the people who formed the gay liberation front were completely different from the early groups. the earlier groups were very traditionally organized, you know, with a leader and a kind of orderly meetings, so there was another wave of

action, and people like myself who came out of the women's movement, where i had also organized radical events, we felt that what we called "zaps" were colorful, fun ways to get attention to an issue and to call in members of the press, and to try to force change. What were some examples of these zaps? instead of picketing in front of, let's say, a legislature, we might take over an office. instead of picketing in front of a television show, that might say terrible things about homosexuals, we would take over the TV show. That's a major change in action. one action had to do with nyu,

where i was a graduate student. now as i recall it was supposed to be a dance, a gay dance, and when they canceled it, we seized the dormitory. we went into the dormitory and we stayed there. and they tried to get us out. they turned up the air conditioning in the basement until it was freezing [laughing], things like that, you know, i mean they did various things to try and get us out without getting people arrested, and then eventually they sent the police in, and they arrested people. so our way of trying to make change was to try to force it. we believed -- and i have to say that i still consider myself in my heart of hearts a radical -- and i think that this is, you know what a radical believes, that the patriarchy makes laws that protects the patriarchy. and the laws that are on the books, they can change in a blink of an eye. i hope I'm wrong,

but i think they may be about to change. the laws that we worked for, begging the patriarchy for, for all these years since Stonewall. we felt that the kind of radical cultural change that could be made by changing institutions, by forcing places to change their habits, by raising consciousness in the public, that those kind of changes could not be undone. the way that we made people see that we existed, that there were so many lesbians and gay men. that we were your neighbors and your friends, and we were your worst nightmare and your best fantasy, and we were right there. and if you didn't give us what we wanted, that we were going to try to take it. that radical vision forces the patriarchy to

negotiate with more middle-of-the-road people. Can you put that kind of activism into a more current context? When people in the streets of Ferguson, for example, rise up because a major injustice has been done to a member of their community, then they negotiate with church leaders who seem more respectable, but they eventually replace the head of the police department and they start to make changes in how institutions are run. but if the people in the street don't make themselves visible and rise up, they haven't listened to those other people for all those years. they've been trying to have community meetings with the powers that be. i know there are many other views on this, and i'm not trying to discount all of the efforts that went into making marriage equality possible. things like that. radical vision was probably what forced a real

change in consciousness, or the first change in consciousness in this country, and part of that had to do with radical and may I stress the word, peaceful action. we never, never hurt anybody. many of us came out of the peace movement. and I have to say, you know, in all of the groups I've belonged to, we had fun -- we went in for actions -- many people got arrested, i don't know anybody got hurt. not through us. Let's talk about diversity within the activist groups. There were women of color who belonged to the Daughters of Bilitis. and as far as i know they were a small group and i think they tried as best they could to treat people equally. the gay liberation front had a number of people of color in the group that eventually broke off and called themselves the street

transvestite action revolutionaries, the two prime movers in that were also people of color. sylvia rivera, who was latina, and marcia p johnson, who was african-american. they're both deceased. there were other hispanic and african-american people -- not too many. and i don't remember, there might have been one or two asian american people who were there. and their voices were not heard in the way that they probably could have been heard. and eventually the women of color broke away. there was a group that it was called [inaudible] soul sisters. i really can't speak, you know, for people of color, but I think that they were justly unhappy. There was some attempt here, and also i spent some time in Los Angeles, there were some people who wanted to form an

alliance with the black panther movement. and there was some resistance to that. part of that was because the black panther movement was quite sexist. I think the only woman who spoke up and is still around, you know, angela davis is still a professor, I think in california, but women felt that the panthers were kinda sexist. when i was in california and there was a Venice, California gay liberation front, the Black Panthers were invited to speak at the group. and a member came, and there was quite a lot of debate about alliances with these other radical groups. as time went on and difficulties were faced, what happened to the gay liberation front? by the end of nineteen seventy one the gay liberation front was dissolving and other groups like the gay activists alliance were already forming. so you know groups

were kind of fluid and some of these old groups really did last. and there were parallel movements going on. it wasn't meant to last. there really were a lot of flaws within in these groups, in that a lot of people, especially in the gay liberation front, did not get along with each other and had opposing political views and so you know these groups came and dissolved, and other groups came along, and then more specific groups came along, groups that addressed the needs of these groups that were within the gay liberation front. groups for transgendered people. groups for lesbians came along. groups for women of color came along. so that was really good actually even though you know the major group fell apart i don't see that as a negative in the end. one of the things that gave lasting

importance to the stonewall uprising was that activists almost immediately recognized that the uprising had at least presented an opportunity for a major change in activism, and they seized the moment. they formed these new activist groups and organized events to commemorate the riots. in new york city, the first march came a year after the riots. it was known as the christopher street liberation day march and it set a pattern for gay pride that would eventually spread to many parts of the US and the world. tell us about those early marches.The first march, i was in los angeles, and a couple of interesting things about the first marches. in new york city, the early marches were uptown. in other words, they started at the stonewall and they went to central park where there was a rally. and to me, that's significant, because in the minds of many people like myself, to start uptown, it's almost as if you're marching people down to the bars. and you're marching people down

to a commercial ending, you know, where there's a street fair and there are bars. and it is a parade. and so that was a significant difference in that the early marches were political. in los angeles where i marched in the first march, they had a few floats, but they were kind of in-your-face floats. they weren't like bar floats or commercial floats advertising something. and we walked in the center of hollywood, and people threw things at us. there were very few people on the sidelines back then, you know, it was probably one deep on the sidelines, even in the center of the parade. maybe there were a thousand people marched. in boston you know a really large parade. but it was significant that the year later we did this. and that we did it and that there were these marches. I think there was also one the first year in san

francisco as well in nineteen seventy. and they started to spring up all over the country. and that really is what's significant, you know, is this claiming of a visibility day for us. this is outcasting, public radio's lgbtq youth program, produced by media for the public good in new york, online at outcasting media dot 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 nineteen sixty nine. 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 two of a two-part interview. both parts are available on our website, outcasting media dot org. you said earlier that one thing that bothered you about the marches is that they've turned into parades.

it's good and it's bad, the stonewall march. the good thing is that it creates a kind of visibility, and a kind of bonding experience for people were in such a march, but the bad thing is that for people who come out only once a year, they can feel somewhat complacently that they've done their thing and then they can just go back to whatever it is they do the other three hundred and sixty four days a year, and that really isn't going to cut it in terms of creating social change. What were your goals at that point in the gay movement? what I wanted was for people like you not to face anything. what i really wanted out of my writing, what i really wanted out of stonewall and the marches and all of our struggles was by this century, i wanted people to look at my first book and

say, what is this doing here? let's put in the sci fi section. was there ever a time that people treated other people like this? let's stick it over there. it must be some relic from the distant past. that's really what i hoped for the future. not that we would be out every year hoping that they're not gonna take our rights away from us, which they are doing on a very steady basis around the country now. For sure. it's unfortunate that the struggles of lgbt people are still so commonplace. even with social and political advances being made, the threat of regression looms. soon after the first pride march, one advance was made, one that gradually changed the national understanding of what it meant to be gay. before nineteen seventy three, homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder in the diagnostic and statistical

manual or dsm. in essence, the bible of mental health. but in nineteen seventy three, homosexuality was removed in the dsm. what effects did this have on how queer people thought about themselves? I think, you know, in many ways, the 1973 reclassification can be seen as a milestone, that homosexuality was not an illness. most people woke up after the reclassification and their lives were exactly the same. you can argue that that was a fictional piece of paper, that only slowly helped change the way people thought about themselves, you know, i don't know that anybody who was bigoted about queers the next day said oh i feel fine about you today. i don't know if anybody would really change that. it might change an initial diagnosis, or it probably would

change most significantly -- I think the most significant part of this change is it would change the way students were taught in psychology about LGBTQ people. and the next generations of psychologists might go into the practice with another mindset. that was probably the largest change. and i applaud the people who were diligently, including people like barbara gittings who worked just tirelessly to get that diagnostic change. i mean it certainly was worth doing. our guest is Karla Jay, a longtime LGBTQ activist and retired distinguished professor of women's studies and queer studies. Karla, as the nineteen seventies progressed, so did the gay movement, along with many other movements which often intersected. was there a conflict between a gay movement and the women's movement? Betty Friedan, who was the head of that in many ways,

still in nineteen seventy, was extremely homophobic. she is the one who said that lesbians were a lavender menace who would destroy the women's movement if we were let in. and the radical women's movement, which consisted of the second wave of women's liberation groups, like redstockings, new york radical feminists, redstockings coined the phrase, the personal is political. but when it came to lesbians, it was just personal. they simply didn't want to deal with the lesbians. Rita Mae Brown, who was in NOW and was editing their newsletter, she was one of the people who was fired because she was a lesbian. and what we did about that was, we who were members of the women's movement and the gay liberation front, we organized a

group. we got together in the winter of nineteen seventy, and we met in apartments, and we wrote a manifesto which we eventually called the woman-identified woman. and it starts off by saying something like, a lesbian is the rage of all women. and we wrote the manifesto and it really was a collectively written document. and then we made up T-shirts that had stencils on them, "lavender menace". and at the second congress to unite women, which was a national convention, which was meeting at pier forty one in greenwich village in may of nineteen seventy, we had placards, we had the t-shirts, we had a number of women who were all ready to go, for when the congress started we had one of our zaps.Tell us about it.

a few of the women went backstage. they had cased out the auditorium. and when the congress started, they were backstage and they cut off all of the lights, so that the auditorium was completely in darkness. and when the lights went back on, lesbians in lavender menace t-shirts were completely filling up the aisles of this auditorium. there were signs like, take a lesbian to lunch. we are your sisters. we are women's liberation, and so on. we were also, and i was one of the people, i was planted in the audience in street clothes with a lavender menace t-shirt under my clothing, and i said something like, I'm tired of being in the closet in this movement. and i pulled off my blouse and there was my lavender menace t-shirt. we demanded that

lesbianism be on the agenda of this women's conference. and lesbianism had never been on the agenda of any women's conference. and we also demanded that racism and social class be on the agenda. and none of these issues had ever been addressed at a conference by the women's movement. and it was from that moment that lesbianism became an issue for the women's movement. and also more racism. and now i have to say the radical groups tried a little bit more to address racism, but like much of the other women's movement they were mostly middle-class white women. so there was this uneasy relationship between the women's movement and the lesbian movement. on the other hand, a lot of the women's movement consisted of lesbians. and i have to say that in the gay

movement some of the men were sexist. some of the men were fine, but some of the men were also sexist. so it was difficult to be a lesbian in either movement. clearly, Stonewall had a tremendous impact on the course of gay activism. can you think of any recent events that put the magnitude of what happened at stonewall in perspective for today's youth? i think that we're starting to see daily events. i think that the election of Trump -- he certainly wasn't elected by the popular vote, and, you know, with of all of this manipulation, who knows. but the way in which people have been taking to the streets, i think that we're starting to see a kind of public anger that is reminiscent of the public anger of the nineteen sixties. part of the strategy of the right is to make people feel

so crazy because they're being attacked in every direction that they don't know which way to run. So if you care about things as I do, if you care about the earth, and you care about racism, and you're not a trans person and you really care about the rights of trans people, and you care about the rights of bisexuals, and you care about marriage equality, and you care about people in syria, and -- you can go on and on, right, and you care about choice -- you know i had so many friends whose lives were ruined either by illegal abortions or lack of illegal abortions, i can even start to go there, so if you feel a little crazy by what's going on in the world, you know exactly what this world was like in nineteen

sixty nine. you know, i'm very encouraged by the fact that people are taking to the streets now and going back to the stonewall and being out on the front of trump tower and being out in every city in the united states to say, no, I will not give my consent to what's going on and i'm going to try to do whatever i can every day to make this a better world, for me, for immigrants, for everybody else around me. Yeah. it's encouraging to see that people are still trying to make a difference. throughout our modern history, demonstrations and uprisings have often contributed to major social, cultural, political, and legal changes that have improved conditions for minorities. before the stonewall uprising, the climate for gay people was pretty brutal, and when they were finally pushed too far, the crowds in a near the stonewall inn revolted

in a way that entirely changed the face of a major civil rights movement. Karla, thanks so much for joining us to talk about this pivotal event in the long fight for what we now call LGBTQ civil rights. Well thank you for having me. 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's also a retired distinguished professor of queer studies and women's studies at pace university in new york city. this is part two of a two-part interview. both parts are available on our website, outcasting media dot org. 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, jayme?, callie?, adam, andrea, briana?, jessica, sarah, alex, lauren, dante, josh, and me, druve?. our assistant producer is alex mince? 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 outcasting media dot 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, tumblr, and instagram at outcastingmedia. if you're having trouble, whether it's our home or school or just yourself call the trevor project hotline at eight six six four eight eight seven three eight six, or visit them online at the trevor project dot org. the trevor project is an organization dedicated to lgbtq youth suicide prevention. call them if you have a problem. seriously, don't be scared. they even have an online chat you can use if you don't want to talk on the phone. again, the number's eight six six four eight eight seven three eight six. being different isn't a reason to hate or hurt yourself. you can also find a link on our site, outcasting media dot org, under outcasting lgbtq resources. i'm druve?.

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