The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  STONEWALL REVEALED A GENERATION GAP IN THE GAY COMMUNITY as real and as wide as the one in the rest of society. Ginsberg, who had just turned forty-three that month, heartily approved of the younger people demanding their rights, but as a guru of flower power and Buddhism he also said he considered the rioting and destruction of property “bitchy, unnecessary, hysterical.” On Sunday a hand-lettered sign had appeared outside the Stonewall: “WE HOMOSEXUALS PLEAD WITH OUR PEOPLE TO PLEASE HELP MAINTAIN PEACEFUL AND QUIET CONDUCT ON THE STREETS OF THE VILLAGE—MATTACHINE.”

  Randy Wicker admits he was typical of Mattachine’s attitude. He was by 1969 a small businessman—he had a thriving little shop on St. Mark’s Place, Underground Uplift Unlimited, where he sold slogan buttons like the one that had gotten Rodwell kicked out of Julius’, other hip accoutrements, and underground publications such as the SCUM Manifesto. When Al Goldstein started publishing his sex tabloid Screw, Wicker was one of the first shopkeepers to sell it. At Goldstein’s invitation he wrote an article for the May 23, 1969, Screw, its fourteenth issue, about anal sex. Al titled it “Up the Ass Is a Gas.” It got Screw busted for promoting sodomy. Wicker was also a coeditor, with Ginsberg and others, of the pro-legalization Marijuana Newsletter. His name was at the top of the masthead. “I guess they figured if someone was going to get busted, it was better to have Wicker take the fall,” he later quipped to an interviewer. For all that, he still believed in changing the system through nonviolent protest, the way he’d been doing with Mattachine for years, not in revolution. He’d had a falling-out with the more hotheaded Abbie Hoffman, a St. Mark’s neighbor, who accused him of being a “hippie capitalist.”

  On Sunday, July 6, the weekend after Stonewall, Wicker gave a speech at the Electric Circus, right across the street from his shop. In the previous few years the Fugs had played there when it housed Stanley’s bar, then Warhol turned it into the disco Exploding Plastic Inevitable and installed the Velvet Underground as the house band. Then a man named Jerry Brandt, a rock promoter who worked with acts from Sam Cooke and Chubby Checker to the Rolling Stones and Carly Simon, turned it into the Electric Circus in 1966.

  Hearing about Stonewall, Brandt and his partners invited Wicker and Mattachine to host a night for gay men and women that Sunday. The club quickly distributed a flyer, “Oh Boy!,” inviting gay people tired of being “packed into over-crowded, over-heated, over-priced, Mafia-controlled sewers” to come. The night started out peacefully, with gays and straights dancing. Then Wicker got up to give a talk, in which he voiced his concerns that if the younger gays got too out of hand “homosexuals would be the bogeyman of the ’70s.” He quoted Jesse Jackson’s line that rocks through windows don’t open doors. Among the fired-up younger crowd it marked him as out of touch or, as he put it, “the numbnuts of Stonewall. I went from being the spokesman of gay civil rights to the trash can of history that night.” It also provoked a fight when a guy who apparently hadn’t been informed that he was at a gay event freaked out and began to beat a young gay man standing next to him. He was dragged out, raving about “queers and fags.” Wicker gave the bloodied young man a ride home. “He told me, ‘I’ve been in the movement a week and beaten up three times.’ I said, ‘That’s amazing. I’ve been in the movement for eleven years and haven’t been beaten up yet.’ ” Wicker felt it confirmed his fears that the new militancy would dismantle all the work he and Mattachine had been doing.

  In the immediate wake of Stonewall, Agosto says, “The talk on the street was a little more militant, collectively. ‘They can’t treat us this way anymore.’ That’s when the various gay lib organizations and factions started meeting . . . Then, due to the press and worldwide attention, suddenly there was a platform.” The short-lived Gay Liberation Front started with a flyer that declared:

  Do you think homosexuals are revolting?

  You bet your sweet ass we are

  Before the end of the year the GLF broke up in a flurry of leftist policy disputes. From its ashes came the more focused Gay Activists Alliance. Agosto, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rae Rivera, and even Wicker joined the GAA. Agosto was on the committee that found GAA its headquarters, a decommissioned FDNY firehouse at 99 Wooster Street below Houston, in what was coming to be known as Soho. The rent was cheap and there was space for offices, meeting rooms, and large social gatherings. Soho was still dark and deserted at night and felt remote from the Village. But those were its selling points. “We could make all the noise we wanted,” Agosto explains. “We would really be left alone. We wouldn’t have neighbors. We could have dances and meetings all the time.” The GAA’s Saturday-night dances became hugely popular. In 1974 the building was gutted by fire, believed to be arson; suspected perpetrators ranged from disgruntled former GAA members to homophobic neighbors, but no one was ever tried.

  The Stonewall Inn closed in October 1969. It was said that it had just become too visible and hot for its Mafia owners. The big rusty sign came down and various shops occupied the space over the next couple of decades. It became a gay bar again in the early 1990s and has gone through a few managements since. The current Stonewall, like much else in the Village, is a kind of historical re-creation of a more heroic past.

  On June 28, 1970, the first Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day march took place. It started as a few hundred nervous young gays and lesbians marching up Sixth Avenue with handmade banners and signs. By the time they reached Central Park, supporters had swelled the ranks to thousands. It was the start of the Gay Pride parade that has been held every year since.

  The organizers of the early marches were as concerned as Mattachine had always been not to present too flamboyant or stereotypical an image of gays and lesbians. For that reason they decided to bar transvestites like Marsha and Sylvia from marching with them. They worried that if drag queens marched every camera would focus on them and they’d be all you’d see in the news. Marsha and Sylvia’s response was to make their own banner, gather some other drag queens, and march ahead of the parade. “So they ended up leading the whole parade!” Wicker says with a laugh. After that, they were officially included. “Those two lived their lives the way they wanted, and to me, they were Stonewall and the liberation,” Agosto says.

  Skull Murphy went on to a curious second life after Stonewall. He worked with mentally challenged kids, was a Santa at Christmastime, and, maybe oddest of all, emerged as a controversial leader of the gay pride movement. He was chairman of the Christopher Street Festival Committee created in 1972 as a way for local businesses to capitalize on the parade. At Murphy’s urging, the parade altered its route; instead of marching up to Central Park, the parade now began there and ended on Christopher Street where the bars, shops, and outdoor festival were waiting to entertain the growing crowds with drinks, food booths, and tables loaded down with T-shirts and other gay-themed tchotchkes. Arthur Bell, who covered gay issues for the Voice, speculated that Skull was trying to make up for the sins of his earlier life. Others saw it as yet another ploy by the Mafia, or at least a questionable guy with Mafia ties, to skim profits from the gay community. As the 1970s progressed Murphy styled himself more and more a gay activist and rode as a marshal in the annual parade. Marsha rode with him one year. After Murphy died of AIDS in 1989 associates took over the festival.

  For a brief time after Stonewall, Marsha and Sylvia, getting a cold shoulder from the more mainstream gay activist groups, started one of their own, Street Transvestite Activist Revolutionaries, or STAR. Along with a few other drag queens with names like Bambi, Bubbles, and Andorra, they ran STAR House in what Bell called a “dilapidated hellhole” of a tenement building in the East Village. A notorious Village figure named Mike Umbers rented it to them. Though straight, Umbers managed a number of mob-backed gay establishments in the Village, including a gay porn shop called Studio Book Store and a call-boy service. Marsha and Sylvia hoped to create a halfway house for homeless younger drag queens but they couldn’t quite match their street hustling lives to their good intent
ions and Umbers soon evicted them.

  Randy Wicker closed his East Village button shop and in 1973 opened an art deco lamp shop, Uplift Lighting, on Hudson Street near Christopher. Sylvia worked there and Marsha often stopped by to get made up for her evening’s stroll. From 1980 on Marsha lived with Wicker in his Hoboken high-rise apartment. His one stipulation was that she couldn’t come and go in drag, so she’d carry her outfits in a shopping bag and change at the shop.

  Marsha’s body was found floating in the Hudson off the Village piers shortly after the Gay Pride march of 1992. Many friends were sure she was murdered—she’d had those numerous run-ins with violent tricks and gay bashers over the years—but police recorded it as suicide and did not investigate. Wicker and Marsha’s family pressed for the case to be reopened, which it was, though with no results. After the funeral the large crowd of mourners marched over to the river, where they spread her ashes and tossed in flowers. The Marsha P. Johnson Center for gay and lesbian youth in Harlem was named for her, as was the band Anthony and the Johnsons. A few years later Sylvia, forty-four and homeless, tried to drown herself in the Hudson; she was hauled out and taken to Bellevue. She continued to feud for years with mainstream gay activists who, she felt, were selling out transvestites to get gay rights legislation passed. She died of liver cancer in 2002.

  32

  Village Celebrities of the 1970s

  WHEN WE FIRST MOVED HERE WE ACTUALLY LIVED IN GREENWICH VILLAGE, WHICH IS SORT OF THE ARTSY FARTSY SECTION OF TOWN, FOR THOSE WHO DON’T KNOW, WHERE ALL THE STUDENTS AND THE WOULD-BES LIVE, AND A FEW OLD POETS AND THAT.

  —John Lennon

  BY MOST MEASURES NEW YORK CITY HIT A LOW EBB IN THE 1970s. Economically, the city had reached its twentieth-century peak from the postwar years into the 1960s. It’s strange now to think of New York as a major manufacturing center, but in the 1950s there were a million light manufacturing jobs in the city, roughly a third of its total job pool. The port was still busy and midtown bristled with shoulder-to-shoulder corporate headquarters. While downtown Manhattan gave birth to the first American avant-garde, the mainstream music industry, movies, publishing, television and radio, advertising, Broadway, the nightclubs, and the fashion industry all added to the city’s unrivaled reputation as the glittering, bustling capital of the world.

  It started to slide downhill in the 1960s, pushed along by Mayor Lindsay’s ruinous combination of borrowing and taxing to buy off his constituents with social services the city couldn’t afford. It came crashing down fast in the 1970s. The recession and “stagflation” that shoved the nation’s economy into a tailspin hit the city especially hard. The shipping business that had been the lifeblood of the city for centuries had vanished, leaving the greatest port in the world to rot. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s the city’s light manufacturing shrank by more than half and kept dropping. The exodus of corporate headquarters that began in the 1960s grew to a flood in the ’70s. Between 1960 and 1990 the number of Fortune 500 corporations maintaining headquarters in Manhattan dropped an amazing two-thirds. Large portions of the music, film, and television industries left as well. The white middle class and professionals went with them, nearly a million strong, their place taken by new immigrants, many of them poor. The city government was borrowing two-thirds of its budget by 1975 and would have lapsed into bankruptcy had President Gerald Ford actually refused the request for a federal bailout as he’d threatened. The city cut more than fifty thousand jobs, froze wages, hiked bus and subway fares, and ended free tuition at City University. As a result, basic services dropped to Walker-era lows. Trash piled up and potholes yawned. Crime skyrocketed while the NYPD put too few officers on the streets. Curtis Sliwa and his Magnificent 13, later the Guardian Angels, began policing the streets for themselves. City schools spent $3 billion a year to graduate illiterates. Parks deteriorated into litter-choked rat warrens where only criminals and bums dared tread. The Mafia-riddled unions were bleeding the city dry. New York felt ever darker, dirtier, more dangerous and dysfunctional. Times Square continued its slide from being the Crossroads of the World to a frighteningly sleazy zone of peep booths, grindhouses, pimps, hookers, and dope addicts. Whole areas of the South Bronx, Harlem, eastern Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side looked like bombed-out war zones as slumlords abandoned or burned down thousands of buildings and the city’s bankers, declining to throw good money after bad, practiced a policy of “benign neglect.” Many of the abandoned buildings became heroin shooting galleries; on the Lower East Side self-described anarchist squatters took over others. Where the city had calmly endured its first blackout back in 1965, in seemed to fall into total anarchy in the widespread looting and vandalism of the great blackout in July 1977. Son of Sam ruled the night that spring and summer.

  BY THE 1970S RENTS IN THE VILLAGE WERE GETTING HIGH ENOUGH that the flow of arty young hopefuls it had been attracting for a good one hundred and fifty years by then was diminishing to a trickle. Some still came, but from now until the end of the century, if you were a young person from the hinterlands coming to New York to start your career as a painter, a filmmaker, an actor or writer or rocker, you were more likely to start out in a tiny cockroach farm on the Lower East Side, which was cheaper and had succeeded the Village as the happening neighborhood. From now on, when arty people moved into Greenwich Village, they tended to be older and already successful arty people who could afford it.

  Like Bob Dylan. After his mysterious motorcycle accident near Woodstock in 1966, which some speculated may have been a cover story for a period of heroin withdrawal (his heroin use was confirmed in a BCC report in 2011), Dylan hid out upstate for a while, recording what came to be known as The Basement Tapes with the Band and reappearing with yet another new style, the country sound of John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. Before it was synonymous with the counterculture, Woodstock had a year-round population of about three thousand that swelled in the summer to twenty thousand, mostly vacationers from New York City. At first Dylan was left in relative peace there, but gradually the groupies, crazies, and fans (he calls them “goons,” “moochers,” “druggies and dropouts” in Chronicles) zeroed in on his home, making life hell for him and his growing family. He kept a couple of pistols and a rifle in the house to scare off the more persistent house crashers.

  More rockers, including Hendrix, began taking homes in the area, forming the kernel of the Woodstock festival, originally planned as a relatively small concert to raise funds for a recording studio in the town. At the last minute the organizers were forced to move the festival to another county. Dylan chose not to attend.

  He decided life might be easier back in Greenwich Village, and toward the end of 1969 he bought 92-94 MacDougal Street, two town houses fused into a mini-mansion in the MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens row. In Chronicles he admits it was “a stupid thing to do.” You can’t go home again. The Village of 1970 was nothing like the Village he’d come to in 1961. It was much more crowded, especially in the heart of the MacDougal-Bleecker fun zone, and much crazier. And the Dylan of 1970 was a global celebrity, not the unknown kid he’d been in 1961. The town house was a far more accessible magnet for goons, moochers, loonies, and tourists than his Woodstock home had ever been.

  None was more obsessed with Dylan than self-proclaimed Dylanologist and garbologist A. J. Weberman. Alan Jules Weberman was born in Brooklyn and by the later 1960s was a pot-smoking, acid-dropping East Village hippie and member of the Yippies. He’d been a huge fan of Dylan in the early 1960s and like many others was hugely disappointed when Dylan stopped being the protest-singing Voice of His Generation. Believing, not entirely without cause, that Dylan had sold out to the corporate entertainment establishment—and had become a heroin addict to boot—Weberman began scrutinizing Dylan’s lyrics like a Talmudic scholar, searching for messages and meanings hidden under the surface of the words that might explain his hero’s puzzling defection. With the help of another Dylan fan at NYU’s computer center he entered Dylan’s lyrics
on punch cards and fed them to a computer, producing a massive printout he called the Dylan Word Concordance, published forty years later as the Dylan to English Dictionary. It proved to be even more inscrutable than Dylan’s original lyrics, so he tried a new tack.

  Learning Dylan’s MacDougal Street address, Weberman noted the family’s garbage cans next to the front door, a couple of steps down from the sidewalk level, behind a wrought-iron fence. Anthropologists analyze refuse for insights into the daily lives and habits of ancient cultures. Weberman applied the same methodology to his study of the mysterious Dylan. Rooting around in the Dylan family’s garbage cans he found, among the soiled diapers and rotting vegetables, such possibly meaningful clues as a handwritten letter from Dylan to Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, a thank-you letter from the Little Red School House for a donation, a birthday card from Dylan’s mother, fan mail, and hate mail. He wrote an article for the East Village Other, “Dylan’s Garbage’s Greatest Hits.” Soon there were stories about Weberman in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and Time. Esquire hired him to root through other famous people’s garbage. He would claim to have analyzed the garbage of Jackie Kennedy, Bella Abzug, Joe McCarthy’s assistant Roy Cohn, Gloria Vanderbilt, Dustin Hoffman, and, inevitably, Norman Mailer.

  He began teaching an evening course in Dylanology at the Alternate University, a kind of hippie-radical continuing education center and meeting place on Sixth Avenue near Fourteenth Street that offered free courses on Marxism and community organizing along with his. Post-Stonewall it was a meeting place for newly radicalized gay activists such as the GLF. After one class Weberman led about thirty students down Sixth Avenue and through the Village to 92-94 MacDougal. He was going through Dylan’s garbage cans, his students milling around, when they noticed Dylan standing across the street, arms folded, glaring. “He was so mad it looked like smoke was coming out of his head,” Weberman said at the time. Dylan crossed over, Weberman put his garbage bags down, and the two of them walked down MacDougal Street to the storefront rehearsal studio Dylan was renting at Houston and Sullivan Streets. “ ‘What’s this about?’ ” Weberman remembers Dylan asking him. “I said, ‘Well, man, you know, it’s about you and how you dropped out of the movement and how you’re using heroin.’ ” Dylan rolled up his sleeve to show he had no tracks, Weberman says. He claimed that when he got home later that night Dylan called and tried to bribe him by offering him a job as his chauffeur.