The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Washington Square today. (Photograph by Christine Walker)

  33

  After Stonewall

  WE HAVE THE ULTIMATE IN FREEDOM—WE HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO RESPONSIBILITIES!—AND WE’RE ABUSING IT.

  —Larry Kramer

  IN THE WEDDING PHOTO, THE GROOM IS A SMALL YOUNG MAN IN an army uniform, his chest covered in medals and ribbons, one hand inserted in the uniform jacket like Napoleon, looking off to one side and smiling proudly. The bride looms over him, a head taller, thin and gangly in her white gown and veil, bouquet held down at her side, gazing off in the same direction and not looking particularly happy. In fact she looks like she’d rather be somewhere else.

  Maybe she knew the trouble she was getting herself into. The groom was John Stanley Wojtowicz (WOY-towich). His bride was Ernest Aron, a pre-op transsexual. According to Randy Wicker, their “wedding” was held in their rooms at 250 West Tenth Street between Hudson and Bleecker Streets in December 1971. A handsomely restored town house today, it was a gay rooming house nicknamed Boystown in 1971. The wedding was a mock Roman Catholic service, with a priest, whom Wicker believes had been defrocked, officiating. Wicker was there. So was Wojtowicz’s mother, Theresa. She attended, Wicker says, because she adored her son and anything he wanted to do was okay with her. Same-sex marriages wouldn’t be legal in New York State until June 2011, and even then they remained forbidden by the Catholic Church.

  Wojtowicz was a New York native of Polish and Italian descent, a Vietnam vet who’d worked a number of low-end and dead-end jobs since mustering out. In 1967 he married Carmen Bifulco, with whom he had two children before leaving her in 1969. By 1971 he was a familiar figure at the GAA’s Soho firehouse, where he went by the name Littlejohn Basso (his mother’s maiden name). The Voice’s Arthur Bell called him “pleasant, spunky, a little crazy, and up front about his high sex drive.” Wicker remembers other members thinking of him as a “crazy, obnoxious, unlikable bisexual.” He met Ernest that year. Wojtowicz later wrote to the Times, in a letter the paper did not publish, that Ernest “wanted to be a woman through the process of a sex-change operation and thus was labeled by doctors as a Gender Identity Problem. He felt he was a woman trapped in a man’s body.” In 1971 Wojtowicz asked the GAA for permission to use the firehouse for a wedding. It prompted a fierce debate among the membership over whether gay marriage was good or bad for gay liberation. Deciding that the drag and fake-Catholic aspects would make it “a freak show,” they declined, and Wojtowicz went on with it at his apartment instead.

  Late on the night of August 22, 1972, Arthur Bell and Wojtowicz had a remarkable telephone conversation. Bell was in his Manhattan apartment. Wojtowicz was in a bank in the Gravesend area of Brooklyn—and all over the local television and radio news. Earlier in the day he and two accomplices, all armed, had walked into the bank and attempted to hold it up. Cops had arrived, followed by the FBI, news crews, and a crowd that swelled to thousands. As Bell and Wojtowicz spoke, Wojtowicz and one of his young accomplices, the nineteen-year-old Sal Naturale, were holed up with seven bank employees as hostages, negotiating with the cops and FBI.

  If that sounds familiar, it’s because it was the basis for the film Dog Day Afternoon, directed by Sidney Lumet and released in 1975.

  Two days before the bank heist, Ernest had swallowed sleeping pills in a suicide attempt and was taken to the psychiatric ward at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn. In Wojtowicz’s version, Ernest tried to kill himself because they couldn’t come up with the money for his sex-change operation and he didn’t want to live any longer as a man. That’s why, Wojtowicz claimed, he attempted to rob the bank on August 22: he was desperate to get Ernest the cash he needed for the operation. “I did what a man has to do in order to save the life of someone I loved a great deal,” he wrote to the Times. This is the tragic-heroic version of the story told in Dog Day Afternoon. But Bell’s version, which appeared in the Voice the week after the event, added a darker, more complex background. Wojtowicz had actually planned the heist for months, Bell claimed, with help from the Mafia. In the spring, Wojtowicz told Bell, he’d met a Chase bank executive in Danny’s, a gay bar on Christopher Street, and for some reason this man explained to Wojtowicz that on a specific Tuesday in August the Gravesend branch would receive a shipment of as much as two hundred thousand dollars in cash that could easily be snatched. Over the summer Wojtowicz recruited Naturale, who was a friend of one of Danny’s bartenders, and another young man, Robert Westenberg. Sometime during the summer, Bell believed, Wojtowicz told Mike Umbers about his plan. Bell theorized that Umbers, manager of all those Mafia-backed businesses, supplied at least one of the weapons. In return, Wojtowicz was supposed to split the take with the mob fifty-fifty. (Speaking in 2012, Wicker declared the late Bell “full of shit” about this mob connection, claiming Bell was merely repeating scuttlebutt he’d heard on the street.)

  At three in the afternoon on Tuesday, August 22, Wojtowicz, Naturale, and Westenberg marched into the Gravesend bank with guns waving. Then their problems started. First, they’d missed the shipment and there was only a little less than thirty thousand dollars cash in the bank. Then the cops showed up outside, and Westenberg bolted, leaving Wojtowicz and Naturale with seven hostages. The famous standoff developed. As the crowd and the media grew, Wojtowicz played to them, ordered pizzas, camped it up, and gave several interviews to the press on the bank’s telephones.

  Bell heard about it around 10 p.m. that night, got the number at the bank, called, and was amazed when his old friend Littlejohn picked up. Wojtowicz, afraid that things were going to end badly, asked Bell to hurry out there and act as his mediator with the law. When Bell said it might take him a while, Wojtowicz replied, “Grab a cab. I’ll throw a few hundred-dollar bills out the window.” When Bell got there the officers in charge wouldn’t let him speak to Wojtowicz. He did meet up with Ernest, who’d been brought from the hospital, looking wan in a housecoat and slippers. Ernest explained that he’d actually taken the sleeping pills in a melodramatic attempt to stop Wojtowicz from carrying out the planned heist. He said Wojtowicz had never told him that some of the take would pay for his operation. Ernest told Bell that the marriage had been rocky and unhappy, and that Wojtowicz “was sadistic in his sex habits” and “terrified” him. Bell also met up with another of Wojtowicz’s lovers, who claimed that Wojtowicz planned to use the money to run away with him.

  At around 4 a.m. the two bank robbers and their hostages filed into a waiting vehicle, arranged for them by negotiators, which sped off toward Kennedy airport, where a plane supposedly waited to fly Wojtowicz and Naturale to freedom. At the airport the FBI sprang, killing Naturale and arresting Wojtowicz. While the GAA debated whether or not to embrace the event as a revolutionary act—there was a lot of that going on at the time—Naturale’s bartender friend asked them to help fund Sal’s burial. They did not, and Naturale joined Dawn Powell and hundreds of thousands of others in the potter’s field on Hart Island.

  Life did a spread on the event that September. A Hollywood producer read it and paid Wojtowicz $7,500 for the film rights. At his court-appointed lawyer’s suggestion, Wojtowicz set aside five thousand for a defense fund; he ended up being sentenced to twenty years in prison. He gave the remaining twenty-five hundred dollars to Ernest to pay for his sex change. On a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1973, Wicker says, he picked up Ernest at a gay rooming house in Brooklyn run by a man named Frank, who preferred to be called Franny. Wicker drove Ernest, who by then had been taking female hormones and was calling himself Liz Eden, to a doctor’s office in Yonkers for the first step in the sex-change process: castration. All the other gay men in the house either begged Liz not to go through with it or taunted him about it. One told him to “go ahead and cut them off, baby. I never thought of you as really having balls anyway.” Liz replied, “Even with no balls, I’ll still have a cock a lot bigger than yours.” From behind bars, Wojtowicz had promised Ernest/Liz that if he became a woman they’d get m
arried again, legally this time. In the Yonkers doctor’s office, Liz waited forlornly for a promised call from Wojtowicz, which never came. However, Carmen, Wojtowicz’s legal wife, did call. She and Ernest had become friends after the failed robbery. The operation was agonizing; Ernest was so nervous and tense that his testicles withdrew into his abdomen and the doctor had to search for them. After the operation, a butch young lesbian came to the office to discuss a sex-change with the doctor. She offered to take Ernest’s testicles. Wojtowicz had asked for them to be sent to him in a jar. The doctor refused both requests. Liz later completed the process to become a fully transgendered woman. Wojtowicz divorced Carmen but never married Liz.

  Wojtowicz and thirteen hundred other inmates at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, watched a special screening of Dog Day Afternoon when it came out in 1975. His unpublished letter to the Times that year was largely a critique of the film, which he complained was “only 30% true.” He loved Al Pacino’s portrayal of him, of course, and thought Chris Sarandon was excellent in the Ernest role. However, he noted that “the actress playing my mother overdid her role, especially the overprotective Mother type baloney in it.” She was Judith Malina.

  Wojtowicz was released in April 1987. Liz Eden died of AIDS in Rochester that September. Wojtowicz lived quietly with his mother in Brooklyn until he died of cancer in 2006. “He wasn’t mean or anything,” Theresa told the Daily News. “He was very, very good to me.” Refused the military burial he’d wanted he was cremated instead.

  “STONEWALL WAS PRETTY AMAZING,” EDMUND WHITE RECALLS. “I moved to Rome shortly after it happened, and when I came back a year later, everything had changed. There were suddenly lots of gay bars, including back-room bars, and giant discos in the meatpacking district that were on several floors. All that was just totally new to me. Lots of go-go boys, all that kind of stuff.”

  The Stonewall Rebellion had transformed the gay Village. The neighborhood had always been a magnet for gay men but now they were conscious of themselves as a community—or a “gay ghetto,” many said—and a rapidly growing one, as men flocked to the Village from all points to be part of it, to party, or just to see it. Agosto remembers gay tourists flooding the west end of the Village. “People were paying homage,” he recalls. The reverberations quickly spread across the country. Gays and lesbians came out en masse and started hundreds of organizations and publications. Through the 1970s they won new acceptance from much, though certainly not all, of mainstream society. Americans expressed a new tolerance for, even fascination with, gay and lesbian cultures. Some young people who weren’t gay wished or pretended they were. Suddenly many of their rock stars were gay or bi or pretending to be—Bowie, Jagger, Lou Reed, Freddie Mercury, the glitter and glam bands.

  And then there was disco, not exclusively a gay phenomenon but widely associated with gay culture. Different cities (Philadelphia, New York) and subcultures (black, Latin, gay) claimed credit for originating disco, but it’s uncontested fact that one of the very first discos, and some argue the very first, started in the Village in 1970. It was not in a commercial club but in David Mancuso’s loft at 647 Broadway—the old Pfaff’s building, a few doors down from the Mercer Arts Center. Mancuso, fed up like so many other young men in the Village with mob-run gay clubs, equipped his loft with a state-of-the-art sound system and began hosting private Saturday-night parties for his friends and their friends, spinning records nonstop all night. A bit of a hippie, he called it “Love Saves the Day,” but as word spread it became known simply as the Loft. It was soon the hottest Saturday-night spot in the Village, and imitators both private and commercial sprang up all over the neighborhood. Where Mancuso’s parties were alcohol- and drug-free, copious drinking and consumption of energy-enhancing drugs, from amphetamines to alkyl nitrite “poppers,” were the norm in most other venues. (Doctors prescribed alkyl or butyl nitrites for heart patients, who broke (popped) small capsules and inhaled the vapors, providing quick relief of chest pain. They became very popular in gay culture in the 1970s, both as a stimulant on the dance floor and as a muscle relaxant aiding anal sex.)

  One of the most popular discos for a few years, the Flamingo, was a members-only all-night party in a loft down the block from Mancuso, on the second floor above the Chase Manhattan Bank at the corner of Broadway and Houston Street. In States of Desire, his 1980 travelogue of gay communities in America, White described “hired musclemen garbed as centurions or deep sea divers or motorcyclists” striking poses on a raised platform as shirtless men on the crowded dance floor gyrated and groped from midnight until ten in the morning. By the mid-1970s disco dominated pop music, and the largest, most posh Manhattan discos attracted huge crowds, straight and gay and undecided, every weekend.

  The gay Village of the 1970s was also the center of a cabaret revival. Nostalgia for the elegance and sophistication of the 1920s and ’30s nightclub era helped launch acts such as Peter Allen and Manhattan Transfer to national stardom. Reno Sweeney’s Paradise Room looked like a small-scale reproduction of a Busby Berkeley set, with art deco and potted palms. Operating on West Thirteenth Street from 1972 (the year the movie Cabaret was released) to 1979, the nightclub named for a character in Anything Goes hosted intimate performances by Allen and the Transfer, Karen Akers, Diane Keaton (who was just then a rising movie star as well), Baby Jane Dexter, Marvin Hamlisch, and Nell Carter. Some odder acts were mixed in with the more straightforward cabaret revivalists, including Patti Smith and the post-Velvets Nico. When Holly Woodlawn brought her drag chanteuse act there in 1973, FBI agents showed up and hauled her off the stage. A few years earlier she’d gotten arrested for impersonating a French diplomat’s wife and cashing a two-thousand-dollar check. She was rearrested at Sweeney’s for failing to make restitution. A few weeks later the club hosted a fund-raising benefit for her. In 1977 Charles Ludlam, founder and star of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, performed his show The Ventriloquist’s Wife with Ridiculous regular Black-Eyed Susan and a dummy he named Walter Ego. Maybe strangest of all, in January 1978 Edith Beale—Little Edie of Grey Gardens (1975)—made her debut there as a cabaret singer. Big Edie had died in 1977 and Little Edie felt she was now free to live out one of her life’s dreams. In a red dress and signature snood with a crown of silk leaves, the sixty-year-old sang “Tea for Two” and other standards and bantered, crazily and winningly, with the packed house.

  THE INCREASING ACCEPTANCE OF HOMOSEXUALITY OCCURRED IN the context of greatly relaxed attitudes toward sexuality in general, the sexual revolution that swept mainstream America of the 1960s and ’70s. Made possible by the Pill, cheered on by Barney Rosset and Al Goldstein and Cosmopolitan and The Joy of Sex and Deep Throat (the latter two in 1972, the same year the Pill became universally legal and available), the 1970s was the Sex Decade, the porn chic decade, the decade when everybody in America was supposed to be having it, experimenting with it, doing it in hot tubs and Plato’s Retreat (the hetero swingers club that replaced the gay Continental Baths in 1977), doing it with one another’s spouses and strangers, doing it in groups, doing it with a lot of drugs, doing it without guilt or shame, or love or affection. Dozens of movie theaters in the city now screened gay and straight porn. Conservative political leaders including Ronald Reagan, religious leaders from the pope to Jerry Falwell, and spokespersons such as Anita Bryant rallied the resistance.

  In the Village, true to tradition, the sexual revolution took on some of its most extreme expressions. Because gay men were identified and stigmatized on the basis of their sexuality, a sexuality they’d hidden all their lives, many of them now equated sexual liberation and political liberation. Gabriel Rotello has written that the more radical among them argued that “if liberation meant rejecting constraints, then to be more liberated meant to reject even more constraints, and the most liberated (meaning the most gay) were those without any constraints whatsoever.”

  “Gay liberation began about men loving men,” the activist and writer Richard Berko
witz says. “But it became about so many men, so little time.”

  The activist and club promoter Jim Fouratt recalls, “It wasn’t about changing the world. It was about getting laid.” Many gay men were having sex with one or more strangers every week. For some men it was many more than one stranger and much more often than once a week. Life for the most active gay man in the 1970s was a nonstop orgy in the baths, the clubs, the backs of gay bookstores, the trucks, and the piers. In the early 1980s Berkowitz’s friend Michael Callen, then twenty-seven, calculated that in nine years of active gay life he’d had sex with about two hundred men a year in the baths alone. When he added sexual activity in clubs, bars, and other venues, “I estimate conservatively that I have had sex with over three thousand different partners.”

  Some gay men began to explore consensual S&M, bondage, and ritual humiliation. Where there had been a few leather bars, such as the Keller, in the 1960s, now there were many full-on bondage establishments, where sadomasochism and ritual mortification became full public spectacles. In their role playing, gay men assumed the costumes of the male figures who had traditionally dominated and oppressed them: cops, bikers, blue-collar workers, Nazis. The Village People would soon adopt similar costumes as kitsch. According to Berkowitz, it was all a way of expressing and maybe purging “a lot of self-loathing, a lot of insecurity, and a lot of the culture’s contempt.”

  Whatever the reasons, the era of “Macho Man” had arrived. Gay Villagers pumped up. Gyms became favorite cruising spots. The new uniform when cruising in the neighborhood consisted of tight jeans, tight white T-shirt, engineer boots, and leather jacket. In a back pocket they wore a bandanna, color-coded to flag the wearer’s sexual preference. Relatively simple at first—black for S&M, green for prostitution, and so on—the code grew bewilderingly long and specific over the years, adding more shades and patterns to signify very precise tastes, until vendors took to giving away helpful cards listing all the many current variations.