Something else entirely happened in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village. When police from the city’s Public Morals Squad arrived to arrest gay patrons and the mafiosi running the bar, many of the two hundred patrons resisted arrest. Some ran away, some refused to produce their identification, and others marched out of the bar flaunting their sexuality. Several of the customers who made it out the front door staged mock performances for the crowd by posing and saluting the police in an exaggerated fashion. As one newspaper report put it, “Wrists were limp, hair was primped, and reactions to the applause were classic.” Black, white, and Puerto Rican drag queens in high heels and butch lesbians wearing crew cuts and leather jackets threw bricks and bottles at the officers, set fire to the building, and, most stunningly, chanted, “We’re faggots and we’re not going home!” Sylvia “Ray” Rivera, who was in full drag and had been in the Stonewall during the raid, remembered: “You’ve been treating us like shit all these years? Uh-uh. Now it’s our turn! … It was one of the greatest moments in my life.”
When the Tactical Police Force arrived to quell the riot, several members of the mob began an impromptu chorus-girl kick line, singing, “We are the Stonewall girls / We wear our hair in curls / We don’t wear underwear / We show our pubic hairs.” One observer recalled a scene that was the virtual opposite of what the homophile organizations had counseled—and one of the great renegade moments in American history:
I saw a bunch of guys on one side and the cops over there, and the cops with their feet spread apart and holding their billy clubs straight out. And these queens all of a sudden rolled up their pants legs into knickers, and they stood right in front of the cops. There must have been about ten cops one way and about twenty queens on the other side. They all put their arms around one another and started forming a kick line, and the cops just charged with the [nightsticks] and started smacking them in the heads, hitting people, pulling them into cars. I just can’t ever get that one sight out of my mind. The cops with the [nightsticks] and the kick line on the other side. It was the most amazing thing. What was more amazing was when the cops charged. That’s when I think anger started. And the cops were used to us calling [them] Lily law, so the cops were used to some camp coming from us. And all of a sudden that kick line, which I guess was a spoof on their machismo, making fun of their authority. I think that’s when I felt rage. Because … people were getting smashed with bats. And for what? A kick line.
Randy Wicker, who had marched for gay “citizenship” in a business suit in front of the White House in 1965, said the “screaming queens forming chorus lines and kicking went against everything that I wanted people to think about homosexuals … that we were a bunch of drag queens in the Village acting disorderly and tacky and cheap.”
The next night, an even larger crowd showed up at the bar. Another riot broke out, and protests were held every night for the next five days. Poet Allen Ginsberg, who as a teenager in 1943 had discovered in himself “mountains of homosexuality,” noticed a new countenance on the Stonewall rioters: “You know, the guys there were so beautiful, they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.”
Whereas homophile movements had avoided using the word gay in any of their publications, a group calling itself the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) formed soon after Stonewall. Within six months, New York activists launched newspapers called Gay, Gay Power, and Come Out! Their combined readership climbed to between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand within a year. The so-called gay liberation movement that followed ended police harassment, broke open notions of what it meant to be a man or a woman, and broadened the sexuality of a whole generation of Americans—queer and straight.
Before Stonewall, it was commonly assumed that homosexuality was a sickness or an evil, and gay meeting places were officially illegal in every city. But in 1970, one year after Stonewall, tens of thousands of men and women gathered in New York’s Central Park and in Griffith Park in Los Angeles for enormous, organized coming-out parties, and the first gay pride parades were held across the country to commemorate the rebellion. Through the 1970s, several gay liberation organizations were founded in the United States as well as in countries around the world. Gay and lesbian studies programs were established in universities. Homosexuality became a common theme in Broadway plays and Hollywood movies. Most dramatically in the lives of gays and lesbians, city governments ended police harassment of gay bars and bathhouses. In the years after Stonewall, gay bars even in small towns no longer camouflaged themselves, and by 1977, there were at least 129 openly gay bathhouses in the United States.
For heterosexuals, gay liberation transformed life in countless ways. Sex was brought not just out of the closet but also out of the home. The rampant and unabashed public gay sex of the 1970s, pioneered on the Christopher Street docks, in the backs of trucks parked in the meatpacking district, at St. Mark’s Baths, in the sand dunes of Fire Island, in gay clubs, and in West Village doorways, induced America to take off its clothes. Nonmarital, nonprocreative, purely recreational sex—the only kind homosexuals could practice—was legitimated for the first time in American culture. Soon after Stonewall, The Joy of Sex, which only a few years earlier would have been banned as pornography for its hundreds of pictures of copulating couples, spent seventy weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and introduced millions of heterosexuals to sexual positions previously thought to be degraded and perverted. As we have seen, before Stonewall, oral sex was considered to be the practice of prostitutes and homosexuals. The medical sexologist Edwin Hirsch wrote in 1934 that oral sex is “generally regarded as loathsome and indicative of a sad degree of sexual perversion.” Through the 1960s, medical experts commonly referred to oral sex among heterosexuals as a “disorder” and “deviation of aim.” The first medical “experts” on homosexual practices, such as David Reuben, whose best-selling Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask appeared in 1969 just before the Stonewall riots, averred that oral sex played “a big role” in homosexual activity but that for most heterosexuals the “big question” was “Should you do it?’” After Stonewall, almost everyone was doing it.
Before Stonewall, Fire Island—the playground of thousands of New York gay men—was the only beach in America where nudity was tolerated by authorities. After Stonewall, illegal nudity at beaches along both coasts increased markedly. By 1973, substantial sections of various beaches, including Cape Cod National Seashore, Moonstone Beach in Rhode Island, Venice Beach in Los Angeles, and Black’s Beach in San Diego, had been colonized by nudists. That year, Eugene Callen and other heterosexual nudist activists founded Beachfront USA as a protest and lobbying group to establish legal nudity on American beaches. By the following year, it was estimated that more than one thousand nudists appeared daily on Venice Beach. “Naturism” spread on the East Coast shortly thereafter. Portions of beaches from Florida to Maine (where the hardiest of naturists ventured) were taken over by nudes in noticeably greater numbers by the mid-1970s. In 1978 Lee Baxandall, who found his passion among the clothes-free crowds at Cape Cod, began publishing Free Beaches magazine and created the Free Beaches Documentation Center, collecting data from all over the world on nude beaches. Later he published Lee Baxandall’s World Guide to Nude Recreation, a color guidebook locating places to go nude all over the world, which became the bible of international naturists. Baxandall and Callen later launched, without government approval, “National Nude Weekend” and “National Nude Week.”
Until Stonewall, psychologists not only considered homosexuality to be a mental illness but also thought of masculinity and femininity as inversely proportional within an individual. The more feminine a person was, the less masculine he or she was, and vice versa. After Stonewall, the psychological profession, as well as the culture at large, changed its mind on both notions.
Emboldened by Stonewall and the burgeoning gay freedom movement, in May 1970 activ
ists with the Los Angeles chapter of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) infiltrated a conference on behavior modification by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). During a film demonstrating the use of electroshock therapy to decrease same-sex attraction, GLF members shouted “torture!” and “barbarism!” then seized the microphone to declare that doctors who prescribed such therapy for their homosexual patients were complicit in torturing them and that homosexuals were not mentally ill. Two years later, apparently sensing a national mood change, the APA invited gay activists to speak at the organization’s national conference. And in 1973, the APA Board of Trustees voted to remove the category of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. That same year, the psychological profession adopted the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, a scale that measured masculinity and femininity as separate and coexistent within an individual. Thus, Americans began to speak not just of feminine and masculine personalities but also of “androgynous” types—people who were both masculine and feminine, or neither.
Today’s movement for gay marriage—a renewal of the homophile movement—ended gay liberation, is helping to end straight liberation, and seeks to return all of us to the 1950s. Like the homophile movement, the gay marriage movement demands that, in order to gain acceptance as full citizens, its constituents adopt the cultural norms of the American citizen: productivity, selflessness, responsibility, sexual restraint, and the restraint of homosexual expression in particular. Proponents of same-sex marriage have justified their demand by presenting homosexual partners as devoted, self-sacrificing, and industrious adults.
Unlike the post-Stonewall gay pride movement, whose annual marches featured masses of naked and semi-naked people in celebrations of sexual openness, the gay marriage movement presents its constituents as sexless and their relations as platonic. Calls have been made by leaders of the movement to ban drag queens from Pride marches and to institute a dress code for marchers. The suppression of sex and the language of respectability are evident on the websites operated by gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender civil rights organizations. In the early 2000s, the website of Lambda Legal featured profiles of gay and lesbian couples, all of whom were identified as long-term couples with respectable jobs, and many of whom were described as committed parents and grandparents. Among the featured couples was Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer and Diane Divel-bess, respectively the recipient of a Bronze Star “for distinguished service in Vietnam” and “an accomplished former professor.” In the site’s section on gays in the military, scores of homosexual members of the armed services offered lengthy accounts of their military accomplishments and nothing on their sexuality. This exchange of desire for responsibility was well illustrated by Carolyn Conrad, whose “civil union” with Kathleen (“K.P.”) Peterson was the first of its kind in the United States following the enactment in 2000 of a Vermont law allowing same-sex couples to become legal spouses. “When I first met K.P., I loved her because she rode a motorcycle,” Conrad said. “And now I love her because she makes the payments on her motorcycle.” Advocates for gay marriage insist that such a reform is necessary to acquire many long-denied rights, yet virtually all those civil rights have been won in Europe through “domestic partner” laws and in the majority of major companies in the United States, which give full benefits to nonmarried domestic partners.
The implications for gay, lesbian, and transgender people are clear. But for straights, they are no less world defining. The homophile and gay marriage movements tell us that the nuclear family is the destiny for all of us who wish to be healthy. Above all, they tell us not just that homosexual acts should be hidden and contained, but as the Puritan strain in American culture has told us from the beginning, all sex should be hidden and contained. For those who reject that notion, the queers of the Stonewall era should be national heroes.
16
ALMOST FREE: THE PROMISE AND TRAGEDY OF REDNECKS AND HIPPIES
White people might have lost their rhythm during the twentieth century, but they didn’t lose all of their renegade nature. During the 1960s and 1970s, millions of ordinary white Americans refused to be good citizens for at least a time. But more often than not, they returned to the values of the Puritans and the Founding Fathers.
There were plenty of white people during the 1960s who acted like renegades. Most famous among these were the hippies and antiwar protesters. But there were also many ordinary-looking white folks who acted like “shiftless” slaves. It is a little-known fact that during the 1960s, an extraordinary number of white workers more often demonstrated a desire to leave the workplace than to take responsibility for it. This was especially true in the automobile industry. Daily absenteeism in auto plants doubled during the decade, and the incidence of strikes unauthorized by a union in all industries also doubled, reaching more than two thousand in 1969. In addition, there was a marked increase of workplace sabotage, insubordination toward managers and union stewards, and other forms of industrial disobedience.
Yet while many whites resisted the American work ethic during this period, a great number celebrated their “Americanism.” To gauge the depth of white working-class cultural identification with the nation-state, one need not look any further than popular reactions to American military ventures since Pearl Harbor. Even during the Vietnam War, hostility toward the antiwar movement was most intense in white working-class quarters. The largest prowar demonstrations were led by predominantly white trade unions, and in the spring of 1970, white construction workers in New York, St. Louis, and Tempe, Arizona, violently attacked antiwar protesters.
The rise of country music as a leading working-class cultural form amply demonstrated this commitment to the flag. During World War II, country music emerged as both a popular and patriotic genre. By the end of the war, at least sixty-five recording companies were putting out country records, and the popularity of country music continued to grow after the war, spreading well beyond its traditional roots in the South. In 1947 Billboard magazine noted that country stars were enormous box-office draws across the country, and that Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan were among the largest markets for the music. Many country songs during World War II contained patriotic themes, including Roy Acuff’s “Cowards over Pearl Harbor,” Bob Willis’s “Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima” and “White Cross on Okinawa,” and Carson Robison’s bluntly titled “We’re Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap (and Uncle Sam’s the Guy Who Can Do It).” One of the most popular songs of any genre during the war was “There’s a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” recorded by the “hillbilly singer” Elton Britt, which tells the story of a crippled “mountain boy” who pleads with Uncle Sam to let him fight. “God gave me the right to be a free American,” Britt sang, “and for that precious right I’d gladly die.” In 1942 Billboard noted the pronounced patriotism in country music:
[The] popularity of fighting country tunes in the music boxes calls attention to the fact that [country music], far more than the pop field, has come through with war tunes of the type asked for by government officials… . The output has continued … doing a fine morale job.
Country musicians’ commitment to the nation continued into the cold war, with such stridently anticommunist songs as Harry Choate’s “Korea, Here We Come,” Jimmie Osborne’s “Thank God for Victory in Korea,” Jimmie Dickens’s “They Locked God Outside the Iron Curtain,” and Elton Britt’s “The Red We Want Is the Red We’ve Got (In That Old Red, White, and Blue).” Hank Williams said “No, No, Joe” to Stalin, and in “Advice to Joe,” Roy Acuff warned the Soviet dictator of the day to come “when Moscow lies in ashes.”
In the 1960s, despite the rise of the “counterculture,” country music continued to be the music of much of the white working class. The number of radio stations with an all-country format grew from 81 in 1961 to 328 in 1966, and by then the popularity of the music was clearly no longer just a “country” phenomenon. According to a market research study, by the mid-1960s, the typical
country listener was a skilled or semiskilled worker living in or near a metropolitan area.
The content of country music became even more militantly patriotic during the Vietnam War, when country musicians led the attack against the antiwar movement. Scores of songs not only denounced the “hippies” and “doubters” who would “rather go to prison than heed their country’s call” but often threatened violence against them. Merle Haggard warned that antiwar protesters were walking on “The Fighting Side of Me.” In Pat Boone’s “Wish You Were Here, Buddy,” the soldier-narrator promises his draft-dodging friend that at the end of the war, “I’ll put away my rifle and uniform, and I’ll come a-lookin’ for you.” And Victor Lundberg vowed in his “Open Letter to My Teenage Son” to disown his offspring if he were to burn his draft card.
Country music and the masses of white Americans who consumed it demonstrated other commitments to cultural citizenship as well. The nuclear, heterosexual family—the bedrock of the American nation—was honored and defended in country songs, especially songs sung and written by women. Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man,” the best-selling country record ever recorded by a woman, and “Don’t Liberate Me, Love Me” became anthems of the pro-family backlash against the women’s movement. The other major women country stars of the period, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, expressed more assertiveness in their songs than did Wynette but consistently upheld the virtues of the devoted, self-sacrificing housewife against those who “march for women’s lib.” Songs performed by women country singers of the 1960s and 1970s that promoted motherhood, chastity, monogamy, and child rearing outsold country songs about women expressing their sexuality, cheating on their mates, dancing at honky-tonks, or drinking. Several scholars have noted that in country lyrics—even in the “outlaw” country movement that projected images of wayward, hard-drinking, womanizing “cowboys”—“satisfactory male-female relations are equated with good marriage.”
A Renegade History of the United States Page 40
