The Gay Metropolis

by Charles Kaiser

  The tour reached its climax in Manhattan on April 23. She arrived at her Carnegie Hall dressing room at 5:00 P.M. For the next three and a half hours, she suffered from a paralyzing stage fright, insisting that she could not possibly perform that evening. One reason for her nervousness was the addition of a new number, the song “San Francisco,” which she had never sung in public before. By 8:30, Lauren Bacall, Jason Robards, Henry Fonda, Rock Hudson, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Tony Perkins, Hedda Hopper, Richard Burton, Carol Channing, Spencer Tracy, Arthur Schwartz, Myrna Loy, Mike Nichols, Harold Arlen, Rex Reed, and 3,149 other fans were all waiting inside the auditorium, wondering whether she would ever appear at all. Outside, scalpers were offering tickets for an astonishing $500 apiece.

  Garland finally opened the show with “When You’re Smiling (the Whole World Smiles with You),” another one of her ironic trademarks. Then she proceeded to give a performance that many witnesses still describe as the most electrifying night in the history of show business.

  Rex Reed had just arrived in New York City. He was only an “office boy in some publicity office,” but he still managed to wangle a ticket. Seeing Judy Garland was “the thing I wanted to do all my life.” He had a great seat: right next to Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. “I think it was probably the greatest experience I’ve ever had in the theater,” said Reed. “I had never seen that much love given to a performer.” Jackson and Wallach didn’t know Reed, but they grabbed him anyway: “They were holding on to each other, and Tony Perkins was right in front of me; and Bernstein. … It wasn’t just the cult who supported her. This was … really an audience of hard-nosed professional critics.”

  A lilting “San Francisco” came out as if it had always been part of her repertoire. But after forty minutes she was drenched. “I don’t know why it is that I can’t perspire,” she complained from the stage. “I just sweat. It’s so unladylike.” But after the intermission she was changed, blow-dried, and ready to go all over again. “Well, you know, I’m like [the prizefighter] Rocky Graziano,” she explained backstage.

  A joyous “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” brought her another ovation. Then she performed her trademark, which was also her covenant. This time “Over the Rainbow” was sung with an eerie combination of mother and child. She followed with an effortless “Swanee” and a glittering “After You’ve Gone.”

  It was past 10:30, and Garland had already sung twenty-seven songs. “You really want more?” she asked. “Aren’t you tired?”

  “NOOOOOOOO!” the audience roared back, and she finally ended with “Chicago.”

  Judith Crist saw tears running down Leonard Bernstein’s face, and a usually impassive Henry Fonda was shouting “Bravo!” Garland said, “I love you very much! Good night! God bless!” But nobody wanted to leave.

  “It was absolute pandemonium,” Crist reported. “The entire audience ran to the footlights with their hands in the air, screaming ‘Judy! Judy!’ And she touched all the hands she could. Then Rock Hudson lifted [Garland’s children] Lorna and little Joey on the stage, and she hugged them and leaned down to kiss Liza, who was in the front row, and the audience screamed for more. … The children were touching people’s hands and it was like a sea.” Rex Reed thought, “It was the greatest triumph in anyone’s life.” It was also the elegy for an era.

  SEVEN YEARS later, America had become a different country altogether. John and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had all been murdered, and the kind of music that Judy Garland was famous for had been pushed off center stage by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, the Supremes—and scores of other artists embraced by a new generation of music lovers.

  In 1968, a dazzling twenty-year-old New Yorker named Laura Nyro proved just how much the world had changed when she released Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, a brilliant concept album of “bright gospel rock,” in which all the songs fit together to tell a story. None of them sounded anything like any pop record of the past. Nyro’s fans included gay men, lesbians, and (in 1968) a much larger group of the young and the hip. Her compositions celebrated everything that was different and original about the new decade. And they explicitly enumerated the joys of cocaine and bisexuality—the guilty pleasures that performers from Garland’s generation had only been able to enjoy in secret.

  By the end of 1968, Garland had entered her final decline. At a Christmas party at Arthur, Garland started a long conversation with the night manager, Mickey Deans, who was already an acquaintance. On an impulse, Garland and Deans told the gossip columnist Earl Wilson that evening that they were getting married. Three months later, the wedding actually occurred at the Chelsea registry office in London. Three months after that, in London, on June 21,1969, Garland took yet another overdose of barbiturates. But this time she never woke up. She was forty-seven. She was also $4 million in debt.

  “The greatest shock about her death was that there was no shock,” Vincent Canby wrote in the Times. Her body was flown back to New York City. Liza Minnelli remembered that her mother had told her to get Gene Hibbs, a famous makeup man, to do her face for her funeral, but Hibbs was unavailable, so Minnelli got Charles Schram instead, the man who had done her mother’s face for The Wizard of Oz. Frank Sinatra wanted to pay for the funeral but Minnelli declined his offer. When she viewed the coffin, she was sure she could hear her mother’s voice. “Don’t I look just beautiful?” Garland seemed to ask. “Goddamn you do!” Minnelli answered back out loud. For a day and a night, more than twenty thousand fans waited in the fierce summer heat to pay their last respects to Garland in a white, glass-covered coffin in the Frank Campbell funeral chapel on the East Side. Manhattan had seen nothing like it since 1926, when Valentino’s death sparked riots, and his lying-in-state attracted a crowd eleven blocks long.

  Minnelli requested that no one wear black to the funeral. James Mason began his eulogy at one o’clock on Friday, June 27, and it was broadcast into the street by loudspeakers for the thousands who were lined up outside 1076 Madison Avenue. When Mason was finished, the mourners sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the same song that Garland had insisted on singing on her CBS television program as a tribute to John Kennedy after his murder.*

  NO ONE WILL ever know for sure which was the most important reason for what happened next: the freshness in their minds of Judy Garland’s funeral, or the example of all the previous rebellions of the sixties—the civil rights revolution, the sexual revolution and the psychedelic revolution, each of which had punctured gaping holes in crumbling traditions of passivity, puritanism and bigotry. All that is certain is that twelve hours after Garland’s funeral, a handful of New York City policemen began a routine raid of a gay Greenwich Village nightspot, and the drag queens, teenagers, lesbians, hippies—even the gay men in suits—behaved as no homosexual patrons had ever behaved before. Deputy Police Inspector Seymour Pine, who led the raiding party, would never forget it. “I had been in combat situations,” he said, but “there was never any time that I felt more scared than then. … You have no idea how close we came to killing somebody.”

  The Stonewall Inn at 53 Christopher Street was not an elegant establishment; it didn’t even have running water behind the bar. But the crowd was unusually eclectic for a gay place in this era, and sixties types like Jack Nichols enjoyed the feeling of “free-wheeling anarchy” inside. Like nearly all gay bars in 1969, its existence depended on two groups that younger gay people despised: the Mob, which owned it; and the local police, who took weekly payoffs from it. Because the “inn” was without a liquor license, it pretended to be a “bottle club,” which meant that everyone had to sign in at the door. “Judy Garland” and “Elizabeth Taylor” were two of the most popular pseudonyms. On weekends, admission cost $3, in return for which one got two tickets, good for two drinks. According to the historian Martin Duberman, this obscure venue was an unlikely gold mine: the weekend take often approached $12,000, the weekly payoff to the precinct was alwa
ys $2,000 and the rent was just $300 a month.

  The bar had often been raided before, but this raid was different because it occurred without a prior warning to the owners.* Shortly after midnight, about a dozen policemen arrived at the front door.

  Inside, the fifties tradition of flashing white lights to warn of incoming undercover men had been maintained, and the dancing stopped before the raiding party entered. After checking for attire “appropriate” to gender—a requirement of New York state law—the police released most of the two hundred patrons. Only a couple of employees and some of the most outrageous drag queens were arrested. Outdoors in the summer heat, the mood was festive, but many eyewitnesses also remember a febrile feeling in the air. Several spectators agreed that it was the action of a cross-dressing lesbian—possibly Stormé DeLarverie—which would change everyone’s attitude forever. DeLarverie denied that she was the catalyst, but her own recollection matched others’ descriptions of the defining moment. “The cop hit me, and I hit him back,” DeLarverie explained.

  For the first time in history, “The cops got what they gave.”

  This had never happened before.

  There was instant pandemonium. The police were pelted with pennies, dimes, and insults, as shouts of “Pigs,” “Faggot cops,” and “This is your payoff!” filled the night. Morty Manford remembered a rock shattering a second-floor window above the bar’s entrance, which produced a collective “Ooh!” from the crowd. The raiders quickly retreated inside and bolted the heavy door behind them. But one of the demonstrators had pulled a loose parking meter out of the ground and started to use it as a battering ram. Jeremiah Newton saw inmates of the Women’s House of Detention throwing flaming pieces of toilet paper out their cells. “They fell down very delicately, very gracefully, extinguishing before they hit the bottom,” he said. Sheridan Square Park was directly across the street, and it provided excellent ammunition: “It was full of bottles and bricks,” said Newton. “It just happened to be the right place at the right time. If the Stonewall had been further down the block, where nobody could stand across from it, perhaps nothing would have happened.”

  Believing he could intimidate the crowd, Inspector Pine raced outside and grabbed one of the demonstrators around the waist. When Pine pulled him back in, Howard Smith, a Village Voice reporter who had accompanied the raiding party, quickly recognized the policeman’s quarry: it was Dave Van Ronk, a well-known heterosexual folksinger (and a good friend of Bob Dylan) who had wandered over from the Lion’s Head next door to investigate the disturbance. Once inside, Van Ronk was badly beaten by the furious policemen. Then the cops grabbed a fire hose to try to keep the screaming demonstrators away, but it produced only a feeble spray—and more ridicule from their attackers. “Grab it, grab his cock!” someone yelled from the crowd, and Craig Rodwell shouted, “Gay Power!”

  Now one of the attackers was spraying lighter fluid through the Stonewall’s shattered windows and throwing in matches to try to ignite it. Suddenly there was a whoosh of flame inside the bar. The cops pulled their guns from their holsters and trained them on the entrance. Inspector Pine was afraid: he thought he might have to kill some of the kids, and he really didn’t want to.

  “The homosexuals were usually very docile, quiet people,” said the policeman.

  “But this night was different.”

  At the very moment that the cops were preparing to shoot the next demonstrator who came through the door, the policemen finally heard the distant sirens of the Tactical Patrol Force, the helmeted veterans of countless antiwar demonstrations who had finally arrived to rescue them.

  “It was that close,” the witness from the Voice reported.

  “We were completely relieved,” said Pine.

  As the TPF waded into the crowd of protesters in the street, the cops inside put their guns away. But the newly formed lavender brigade continued to confound them: instead of running from the TPF, they kept on throwing bricks and bottles and setting fires in trash cans. Randy Wicker remembered bonfires in the street and barrels going through windows: “All I could think was, Oh my God, they’re going to burn up a little old Italian lady or some child is going to be killed and we’re going to be the bogey-man of the seventies.”

  Randy Bourscheidt saw a “black guy, a queen, running in a mincing way up Christopher Street, screaming in falsetto, ’Let my people go!’—as gay people were being shoved in paddy-wagons.”

  “This was in the time of Martin Luther King. It was both funny and touching.”

  Stormé DeLarverie remembered, “Stonewall was just the flip side of the black revolt when Rosa Parks took a stand. Finally, the kids down there took a stand. But it was peaceful. I mean, they said it was a riot; it was more like a civil disobedience. Noses got broken, there were bruises and banged-up knuckles and things like that, but no one was seriously injured. The police got the shock of their lives when those queens came out of that bar and pulled off their wigs and went after them. I knew sooner or later people were going to get the same attitude that I had. They had just pushed once too often.”

  William Wynkoop, who had first been radicalized a quarter century earlier, was awakened by the noise: “I got up and I looked out the window and really, it was amazing. They were coming from east of here, from Sixth Avenue. In droves! Not only on the sidewalk, but on the street. They were coming down Gay Street—large numbers of people—some running. They were coming down Waverly Place. I stuck my head out and I saw a big crowd over on Christopher Street. It was two o’clock in the morning. I had to get out and see what was going on. They were all ages, and I was overjoyed. The more I heard about this, the more exalted I felt. I remember walking over to Sheridan Square, and everybody was talking about what had happened. It was amazing! And I think it’s wonderful that the ones who started it were drag queens. Young, young, tender drag queens. Flaming faggot types. They were the ones who started the rebellion. And I think maybe this is ordained because those who had been most oppressed were they.

  “No doubt: Oppressed, despised, laughed at, scorned.”

  But suddenly, the scorn and contempt were all flowing in the opposite direction. When the TPF challenged the protesters from behind their shielded helmets and bulletproof vests, they were greeted by an astonishing, impromptu performance. The drag queens kicked up their heels and sang at the top of their lungs:

  We are the Stonewall girls

  We wear our hair in curls

  We wear no underwear

  We show our pubic hair

  We wear our dungarees

  Above our nelly knees!

  It was “totally spontaneous” theater, the underground paper Rat reported.

  Lucien Truscott IV wrote in the Voice that “the generation gap existed even here. Older boys had strained looks on their faces and talked in concerned whispers as they watched the up-and-coming generation take being gay and flaunt it before the masses.”

  By four A.M., the first night’s riot was finally over, with four policemen injured and thirteen demonstrators under arrest. But twenty-four hours later, both sides were back in the streets, and Allen Ginsberg had arrived to investigate. “Gay Power! Isn’t that great!” he exclaimed. He was delighted by the scene inside the Stonewall, which had already reopened. “The guys there were so beautiful. They’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.”

  When the Voice hit the street three days later, some people thought the tone of Truscott’s story sparked the riots all over again. “Sheridan Square this weekend looked like something from a William Burroughs novel as the sudden specter of ‘gay power’ erected its brazen head and spat out a fairy tale the likes of which the area has never seen,” Truscott wrote. Once again, a crowd of at least five hundred roamed the streets, and four more demonstrators were arrested.

  The Daily News returned to the scene to investigate the following week. On July 6, the largest-selling newspaper in the country proclaimed to its millions of readers, “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees
Are Stinging Mad.” News reporter Jerry Lisker wrote, “The whole proceedings took on the aura of a homosexual Academy Awards Night. The Queens pranced out to the street blowing kisses and waving to the crowd. … The War of the Roses lasted about two hours from about midnight to 2 A.M.”

  The very first gay-authored account of the uprising appeared in Screw magazine, the almost entirely heterosexual pornographic tabloid founded by Al Goldstein. Within it, there was a regular column cowritten by Lige Clarke and his lover Jack Nichols, who was now Screw’s managing editor. The column reported Ginsberg’s visit to the Stonewall, as well as a peace offering from the Electric Circus, a famously hip nightclub on St. Marks Place, which had taken the unprecedented step of inviting openly gay people to mingle with heterosexuals on the dance floor. “If you are tired of raids, Mafia control, and checks at the door,” said the Circus, “join us for a beautiful evening on Sunday night, July 6th.” Clarke and Nichols reported that “for the first time in New York’s history, a huge club was experimenting with social integration between heterosexuals and homosexuals.” The evening was a huge success, except for a single “uncool creep” who suddenly started shouting “Goddamn faggots!” He was quickly hustled out of the premises.

  The columnists concluded their report with a rousing call to arms:

  The revolution in Sheridan Square must step beyond its present boundaries. The homosexual revolution is only a part of a larger revolution sweeping through all segments of society. We hope that “Gay Power” will not become a call for separation, but for sexual integration, and that the young activists will read, study, and make themselves acquainted with all of the facts that will help them carry the sexual revolt triumphantly into the councils of the U.S. Government, into the anti-homosexual churches, into the offices of anti-homosexual psychiatrists, into the city government, and into the state legislatures which make our manner of love-making a crime. It is time to push the homosexual revolution to its logical conclusion. We must crush tyranny wherever it exists and join forces with those who would assist in the utter destruction of the puritanical, repressive, anti-sexual Establishment.