by Jack Nichols
(09/25/02)
[Articles Editor's Note: It's often said that if we do not learn from the
lessons of the past, we will be consigned to repeat their mistakes. This may
also be true of the joys and victories of the past. If we do not commemorate
them, we may forget to celebrate them. In an effort to trace and honor the roots
of the gay movement, Clean Sheets offers this reprint of an article written
by Jack Nichols, editor of Gay Today.
Take a moment, to remember when...]
The Stonewall Inn, between 1967-1969, was often a fun place. I recall a freewheeling,
colorful and democratic scene attracting a great variety of types, especially
long-haired youths trying -- as youths often do -- to get away from their otherwise
"proper" home environments and meeting gladdened refugees in flight from pre-69
Manhattan's generally unappealing gay bar circuit.
Only a few years before, I'd frequented the Ce Soir, one of Gotham's two gay "dance" bars where, in a back room, a light bulb hung ominously from a single cord, ignited whenever an unknown customer entered the front door. The lighting of the bulb signaled that dancing couples must separate.
In June, 1969, The Stonewall Inn was light years away from this furtive past,
attracting the arrival of what media soon began calling "the new homosexual,"
emboldened by the 1960's counterculture, by new standards challenging gender
roles. Pot -- the good weed -- was, in those days, the drug of choice.
It was under the influence of this organic substance, in fact, that many contemplated the social revolution going on around them. It inspired assaults on inhibitions and encouraged the bold to denounce a frigid past, to look toward the creation of a new world consciousness.
Hippies, a gentle, loving, environmentally conscious, Zen-reading, LSD-gobbling,
sexually communal, nonjudgmental, nonviolent critical mass, had upset the apple
cart of social decorum. There was hope in their eyes, hope for a better future.
When straight hippie males made love to women in each other's company, touching
other males became less fearsome, producing, for an extended time, a phenomenon
the media called bisexual chic. Gay-baiter Joseph Epstein, writing in Harper's
(1970) told of his shock after he'd asked his long-haired seventeen year-old
straight hippie stepson what he knew of "the new homosexuals."
"If you mean guys buggering each other," replied the boy, "it goes on all the time, and drugs don't necessarily have to be involved. 'You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours,' is kinda how guys see it."
My own late-Sixties early-Seventies experience confirmed this boy's perspective.
I began hoping -- in contrast to ghetto separatists -- for a final melting of
gay/straight divisions and the creation of a sexually integrated society in
which everybody would free to love and make love without self-identifying through
specialized sexual labels. I hoped that the developing demand for the equalization
of the sexes would help bring such a world into being.
The counterculture revolution was seen by gay conservatives and by right wing
politicos as a threat to the social order. The gay conservatives sought a world
in which previously acceptable heterosexual standards were to be implemented
in gay circles. They established gay Christian churches, sought to have their
own children not through adoptions but through artificial inseminations, suggested
imitation establishment marriages, and asked, along with heterosexual males,
the right to fight and kill for a belligerent, Vietnam-punishing Uncle Sam.
The conservatives we have with us always.
But the straight counterculture, and "the new homosexuals" were going, during the Vietnam war, in another direction, declaring themselves "gay" at the draft boards to muddle conscriptions and to denounce the war. In our columns Lige and I called for "buggering up the barracks" and "clusterfucking for peace."
Lige Clarke was, like me, a gay counterculture type. His observations on matrimoniacs and the crumbling institution of marriage, his concerns for suffering, starving children in an overpopulated world; his disdain for the prudish Richard Nixon and for the silly self-righteousness of established powers like the churches; his experience of the wasteful Pentagon (where he'd previously edited, with 11 security clearances, top secret messages in the office of the Army Joint Chief of Staff), made his views quite different, as were mine, from that of the gay assimilationists.
Our militant gay activism had preceded the Stonewall uprising by nearly a decade. In 1965 we'd launched picketing in Washington's direct action group, the Mattachine Society. But it was a foiled police raid on the Stonewall Inn in late June, 1969, that first caught the media's attention. The Stonewall uprising offered just the right mix of dramatics: youths fighting back for the first time against police corruption, the stuff of a legend.
Almost immediately, it became clear there were those who would integrate gays
into the mainstream culture and those who believed that culture to be unredeemable.
As gay columnists writing for the then-zany SCREW, an otherwise straight tabloid,
and for the gay newspaper, The Advocate, Lige Clarke and I wrote the
first journalist's published accounts of the Stonewall rebellion and, because
of our counterculture underpinnings, we not only celebrated it, but called on
the youths of our time to press the Stonewall uprising beyond its narrow boundaries.
On July 8, 1969, sounding the counterculture's view, we issued this "call to
arms":
"The homosexual revolution is only 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 which
will help them to 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 lovemaking 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."
We spoke, at the time, not so much of a homosexual revolution but of a revolt
much larger in scope, one that addressed underlying problems like America's
general difficulty facing as an extremely positive phenomenon, sexuality of
all kinds. John Loughery, in his award-winning and exquisitely written history
of the gay 20th century, The Other Side of Silence, explained part of
what we aimed to accomplish:
"This was part of a 'vision of liberation,' as novelist Michael Rumaker wrote,
encompassing more than gay rights: 'The larger vision was the death of flesh hatred and shame.'"
