American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with William Eskridge, 1 of 3

Let's just start back by going back to 1969. Okay, now I have a study of 14 raised in the Arab party Frank. What's a gay friend that come over? How different was it back in 1969 in terms of what it would like to be gay versus the legal system? In 1969 what it was like to be gay was to be in the closet. If you were a lesbian or a gay man, you had no role models. You had no public figures you could identify with. The only people you could identify with were essentially criminals. And indeed if you were an active homosexual in 1969, you yourself were a criminal. It was a very different era. Let's talk about that. You can go on a little bit longer. What's being homosexual a crime in 1969? In 1969, not only was being homosexual a crime, even talking about it was a crime. In states like New York, there were a whole basket of crimes that gay people could be charged with.

Concentral activities with your partner was the crime against nature in New York. That was a crime. If you solicited someone else in a park for a date, that was a crime. And you'd be arrested for it if you were an undercover police officer. If you held hands, that could be a crime in decent behavior or disorderly conduct. If you were a cross-dresser, a lesbian who wore male clothing or a man who wore female clothing, that was a state crime according to the New York police. If you loitered for a little bit too long near a public toilet, that was a crime. Almost anything that you did of a social nature as a gay person in 1969 was criminal in the state of New York. And what's going to happen to you? Let's say, okay, you don't pay the subway to overcharge the crime, but you pay a small fine to go home. What was the risk? Particularly if you did a solicitation activity in a public place, there was a strong risk that you would be arrested.

In the 1960s, between two and 4,000 people each year were arrested for degenerate solicitation, solicitation for the intent of committing the crime against nature, or some kind of loitering conduct. So there's a very good chance that you'd be arrested. There's some chance that you would have actually gone to jail, though usually not for very long. The main effect of being arrested and pleading guilty is almost everyone did for solicitation or for the crime against nature was civil. The civil disabilities were broad, sweeping, and vast. If you were a known homosexual or someone who was arrested and particularly convicted, the crime against nature or solicitation, you would probably lose your job. Whether it was a private job, or particularly if it was a public job, the federal government would fire you, school boards would fire you, the New York State education system would fire you. You couldn't get a job, you couldn't be a member of the armed forces.

You were disqualified from being professionally licensed in the state of New York for having moral turpitude as the New York authorities considered it. So you couldn't have a license to practice law, you couldn't be a licensed doctor. You needed a license even to be a beautician, and that could be either denied or taken away from you for this sort of crime. You were subjected to all sorts of other civil disabilities. If you were not as a citizen, then you could be deported. You could not be a citizen if you'd been convicted of one of these crimes. The regime in place in 1969 against lesbians and gay men in the state of New York was virtually the same regime as that that was in place in the 1930s in Nazi Germany against homosexuals. New York had some neck up for gay people, some liberal intellectual community people came here in the 60s because they thought, wow, here's where my people are.

How did those two fit together? Well, there were a number of gay people in New York in the 1960s and indeed throughout the 20th century. There were enough people in New York to form a subculture and a very thriving community. And there were also enough to alarm the straight population or at least the purportedly straight population. But there unfortunately were not enough lesbians and gay men who were out of the closet to be a cogent political force at least in the 1950s and the early 1960s in New York. For example, in 1965 the New York legislature comprehensively amended its criminal code and following the advice of all of the professional experts, consensual Sodomy as well as adultery, fornication, and cohabitation were decriminalized in the state of New York in the proposed code. But in 1965 the Catholic Church opposed the decriminalization of both Sodomy and adultery

and they won in the legislature by overwhelming margins. And they won because traditionalists were well organized and were articulate and they won because gay people and their allies were almost entirely in the closet and were ashamed even to take place or take the part in political debate. Well it was a nightmare for the lesbian or gay man who was arrested and caught up in this juggernaut. But it was also a nightmare for the ones who were never arrested and never caught up the lesbians and gay men who lived in the closet. The ultimate price for the criminality of being a gay person in the 1960s in New York was paid probably by the closeted people, many of whom were outspoken anti-homosexual activists. How do you claim that? Well if you were a single man or a spinster woman in New York City in the 1960s, particularly of marriageable age, you could be suspected of homosexuality.

And merely the suspicion of homosexuality was enough to cause employment difficulties for you or if you were in public life as a lawyer or a politician to frighten away potential clients and potential voters. So the unmarried person was under a special pressure to not only reveal that she or he was not homosexual but also to adhere to the anti-homosexual agenda which was that their conduct is criminal, these people are criminal and the public space needs to be aggressively purged of any indication of gender nonconformity or sexual deviation the terms that we use in the 60s. Let's talk about that aggressive purging. This is New York City, we had liberal politicians like Mary Lindsay and Ed Koch. Surely they weren't involved in the purchase. Well liberality depends on the issue. The most anti-homosexual politician in American history was California Governor Earl Warren from 1943 to 1953.

Later a champion of liberal causes as Chief Justice of the United States from 53 to 69. Likewise in New York City many of the icons of liberalism such as Mayor Robert Wagner and his immediate successor Mayor Robert Lindsay did lead campaigns to purge public places of sexual deviation. I don't know how I would characterize Ed Koch who was a subsequent mayor of New York City. I would not characterize him as a liberal but he was aggressively anti-homosexual in the middle and late 1960s. So all of these politicians, whatever their personal beliefs about lesbians and gay men and whether they actually posed any kind of personal threat, they all favored purging public spaces of any kind of indication of sexual or gender nonconformity. How did that play out exactly? What was going on in New York City under Koch Lindsay?

Well all throughout the 60s in New York City there were steady streams of arrests of gay people but there would be also rollercoaster episodes, periods of trough and periods of peak. And the peak periods would typically be based upon public pressure to clean up the streets of New York City. So to give just a couple of examples in the mid 1960s, 1964, 1965 period. The period when the New York World's Fair was attracting visitors from all over America and probably all over the world. The mayor of New York City, the police commissioner, were under pressure to clean up the streets of any kind of, quote unquote, weirdness word that would be used in the 1960s for gay men and lesbians. Ed Koch himself, who was a Democratic party leader in the Greenwich Village area and later a councilman, later a member of Congress, was a specific leader of the local forces seeking to clean up the streets.

When the political pressure would be brought to bear, then police officers would be deployed usually as decoy cops sitting around waiting for dates to be solicited when the solicitation occurred the perpetrators would be arrested. One interesting thing about the crime against nature and solicitation is that the level of criminal activity is directly proportionate to the amount of police resources that you invest. So if you have very few vice cops actively pursuing this line of inquiry, then you have a low crime rate. If you devote more police resources to be decoys and to spy on people, then you have a high crime rate. And so at various points in the 1960s, the crime rate would skyrocket because of local community pressure from people like Ed Koch. A couple things. Can you tell if you're getting into that area and how that played out on the streets of New York City?

Well, there are many kinds of sex crimes, and rape, for example, is a sex crime that is without consent, and therefore you have a complaining witness. For most crimes of homosexuality that I've described, you do not have a complaining witness because all sides are enjoying the activity and profit from it. So how do you actually discover and prosecute crimes of homosexuality such as the crime against nature and solicitation? Well, the main way to do it is either by decoy arrangements or by spying. Spying would entail police officers staked out in toilet areas or even in public parks and so forth. And waiting until two men usually were engaged in the crime against nature, bouncing, and then arresting the perpetrators. Sometimes this would occur in parked cars. The more common way that gay people would be arrested would be decoy cops or decoy undercover agents placed in gay bars, gay and lesbian bars.

And what they would do is they would observe homosexual behavior, handholding and dancing, and then they would strike up a conversation with a suspected homosexual. If the suspected homosexual would make an overture to retire to her or his apartment for the crime against nature, then an arrest would be made. Now of course that means that very often arrests were made when there was no solicitation whatsoever and the arrest was made solely for blackmail or other purposes. So this was a very expensive way to spend taxpayer crime fighting dollars. It was a way that was fraught with opportunities for corruption, payoffs to the police. And it was a way that led to a lot of false charges on the part of the police, either based upon spite or the desire to be paid off.

So there are a lot of things I want to follow up on. Let's just start with one of them. Sure. Can you explain to me, well actually first of all, can you explain just what we have on tape. We say crime against nature. What is the crime against nature? The crime against nature varied from era to era in the United States. It was traditionally only anal sex between two men. By the 20th century it also included oral sex between two men. And eventually by the middle or late 20th century it also included oral sex with a woman. That was not the traditional crime against nature, but by the 1960s it was widely considered to be such a crime. Now in trap, I'd love to get a clear statement. What is in trap and is it legal and how did it play out on the streets of New York? Entrapment is in the mind of the beholder from the point of view of the police. The most effective way to enforce solicitation and crime against nature laws was to stand in a known homosexual congregating area and wait for overtures.

The police did not consider this entrapment even when the police would initiate the conversations. The reason was the police said that the gay people initiated the overture and that they were merely the passive recipients. From the point of view of the gay or lesbian person however, this was entrapment because the police officer would usually make friendly overtures giving every indication that some kind of invitation would be welcome. And so that was considered entrapment from the point of view of the lesbian and gay community in the 1960s. Legally entrapment means that the police solicit the crime rather than arrest for the crime and entrapment is considered illegal and unconstitutional under both the New York and the federal constitutions. So was there illegal entrapment in New York City?

From the point of view of the police there was some but not much illegal entrapment in New York City in the 1960s because they believed that their tactics were legitimate. From the point of view of lesbians and gay men, the city was rife with entrapment and indeed most of the several thousand arrests every year were probably arrests that resulted from entrapment. And again specifically resulted from friendly overtures on the part of the police to which the lesbian or gay defendant responded in a natural friendly but ultimately a restable way. So how intense did it get? You had the entrapment, you had these crackdowns. How many people were arrested at the height of these events and what else were their far-rays? How bad did this get? The arrests in New York City for crimes of homosexuality varied from year to year. At the peak in the 1950s and parts of the 1960s as many as 500 people per year were arrested for the crime against nature and between 3 and 5,000 people per year arrested for various solicitation or loitering crimes. This is every year in New York City. Most of those people did not go to jail but almost all of those people suffered from the civil disabilities that accompanied being arrested for a sex crime.

So even if you weren't arrested in New York City, tens of thousands of gay men and lesbians in New York City were subjected to harassment on the part of the police, threats from the police and even private blackmail that they would be reported to the police or to their employers because they were actually homosexuals. So I would say that most gay men and lesbians and almost all of them that had an active social life were subject to some kind of state penalty or at least discouragement in the 1960s. Now if you're a black person and you're people are blackmailing, you have some civil rights, you have some legal records. Why didn't gayes have the same kind of recourse of blackmail? It is correct to say that if you were a person of color in the 1960s, particularly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and you were subjected to discriminatory policies by the state or even by private employers, you had legal recourse.

The lesbian or gay man in the 1960s had virtually no legal recourse. And the reason was is that the lesbian or gay man was by definition a criminal. Lesbians and gay men in New York City in the 1960s were literally outlaws. Not only were there characteristic conducts, sexual crimes against nature and cross-dressing, criminal in New York, but they were literally outside of the scope of the law and the law's protection. Indeed, in New York City in the 1960s, if you reported crimes against you, you were as likely to be brutalized by the police and subjected to further crimes than protected by the police in New York City. The 1960s were dark ages for lesbians and gay men all over America and nowhere more than in New York City. Lesbians and gay men had formed their own consciousness by then that they were decent, law-biting normal, mentally okay Americans.

Yet they were treated by the law as immoral degenerate outlaws who were not fit to be citizens of the United States. The law did not protect them, the law made them criminals, the law persecuted them and there was an enormous amount of anger among gay people in the 1960s in New York as a result of these legal persecutions. And it wasn't just a threat of going to prison, it was also a statement. The result of being an arrested homosexual in America in the 1950s and 60s included not just criminal penalties and possible prison terms and not just civil disabilities, primarily the loss of employment, but also medical disabilities. In many states, particularly California, you could be sterilized and you could be castrated by the state if you were a convicted sex offender.

In California and most states of the United States, after the 1940s, if you were a convicted sex offender and the judge found further that you were a sexual psychopath, you could be involuntarily and indefinitely detained in mental institutions where you would be subjected to involuntary medical experimentation. The most infamous of those institutions was a Tascadero in California created by Earl Warren, the famous anti-homosexual governor of that state. A Tascadero was known in gay circles as the Dashal for Queers and appropriately so, the medical experimentation in a Tascadero included administering to gay people a drug that simulated the experience of drowning. In other words, a pharmacological example of waterboarding well before the current examples that we've lived with today. Okay.