Original subtitles

Sergeant McGee, the stage manager of this troop, I order you to report to

wardrobe for assignment to ladies of the chorus.

What? Oh, now we're in the chorus, messed up in

girdles and squeeze.

We're here to romance with,

to sing and to dance with a bunch of dirty guys like these.

Teddy, tell me how you feel about Pioneer Square today as compared to 20

years ago.

Being able to walk through it dressed this way.

I think it's a miracle, but part of my mind doesn't believe it.

Why is that? I still keep expecting shit to hit the fan.

The bar patrons who rioted in Greenwich Village after a routine police raid on a

gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, in June of 1969.

could not have known that their wild insurrection would enter history as the

birthday of the gay liberation movement.

Gay is proud.

Today, the lesbian and gay community is a highly visible aspect of American

society. Gay is love.

How did this come about?

By focusing on the unconventional behavior and the often lonely rebellion

of those homosexuals who lived before Stonewall, we can begin to understand

how the gay community evolved.

I felt like I was the only one until I left home.

Home was in North Carolina.

I was brought up on a farm.

I knew enough not to talk about it. I knew enough to hide.

Where I grew up in Iowa, nobody knew anything about sexuality.

Then there was no sex education in the high schools.

Just the misinformation that kids banned me about, that's all.

And the answer to what I knew about sexuality was nothing.

I'd never heard the word lesbian.

My mother would not talk about it at all.

Nothing about sexuality.

One of my friend's father was a doctor, and she used to sneak his medical books

out, and we'd look at his medical books.

and read terms and find out things through those, but none of us knew very

much.

I have the belief that young women fell in love with horses and men fell in love

with one another.

Homosexuality has always been a dirty word.

I cannot remember in my 70-some years the time when it

wasn't a dirty word.

But on the other hand, homosexuality, the practice of it, was not a dirty

thing. I had a decided advantage when I was very young in the fact that I had an

aunt, Kate, and an uncle, Vince, who were both gay.

They approved of everything I did and encouraged me. And my father hated them

because they didn't get married.

See, nobody knew much about the...

the gay life because outside of the cowboys, and that was natural to them.

It's never been brought out, but they were definitely gay because they had to

have sex.

If they didn't have sex with the others, they had it with animals.

fight like the He-Man do.

But he was inwardly troubled by a dream that

gave him no rest.

That he'd go with the heroes in action with only two

hairs on his chest.

For most people who were attracted to members of their own sex denial of these

feelings was their only choice Getting caught often resulted in ruined lives

imprisonment commitment to institutions or suicide My mother was

told that I was living a lesbian life with Valerie all they had she had to say

was I was living a lesbian life and that was grounds to have you committed to an

insane asylum without any

hearing, especially.

At least I was picked up off the street on a Friday, thrown in the police car.

They came to Val's, to the apartment house, and Val knew about it.

She knew they were out there on the street looking for me, so she came and

found me first and warned me.

But I never got to the apartment. They took me right from the street and put me

down into the cycle ward at General Hospital.

When I come out, we didn't have the word gay.

The word for us is temperamental.

So we're temperamental with that way. This is about all they had for us. This

is about all we had for ourselves.

We didn't call it. We did it.

What you call now in the life, then you're just sweethearts.

Wasn't no particular name.

You know you liked a woman, then you just liked a woman.

The first time that I liked a girl, no more than about 14 years old.

Sometimes you would look into a person's eyes, he would look into your eyes, and

all of a sudden you'd know through the eyes.

You knew each other by a red necktie.

It was very daring to wear a hanky that matched the tie, and the moment you saw

that, no matter what the color was, you figured that there was a brother there.

After you had cruised each other by chasing each other back and forth from

looking in the same window at the same thing for quite a while, you might ask

the person, do you have a match, or can you tell me the time?

These were the little things that we would be using in the 20s, and we were

still using them in the 30s, I might add.

That whole society would have been known as the gay society or the gay world or

the world of the demi-monde, the world of the twilight, the world of night.

And so all the people who had to do with that area were always considered people

that were totally disrespectful, and therefore of very questionable morals.

And this would be the world of dance, this is the world of the artists, this

is the world of the people who flitted around in the parks and the forests at

night, the Voix de Boulogne, for example, or Hyde Park in London, or

along the rivers, both the Thames and the Seine.

The people who would be out at night wandering around loose without going

specifically from one place to another were obviously there for no good

purpose. And so this is known as the world of the demimonde. This is the

twilight world, as it was known in the earliest 20th century, and it is the

world of the gay people.

And the gay, therefore, covers all of these people. It covers prostitutes,

covers ladies of doubtful virtue, gentlemen of doubtful virtue, all those

unsavory characters.

The 1920s, a time of economic prosperity, prohibition and speakeasies,

saw an increase in the population of America's cities.

While most homosexuals continued to live in isolation and secrecy, a few began to

gather in bohemian neighborhoods, such as San Francisco's Barbary Coast, New

Orleans' French Quarter, New York's Harlem and Greenwich Village, where

freer social norms allowed the beginnings of a homosexual underground.

The main thought behind the thing was to break the law and live as well as you

could. And everybody did because the speakeasies were all over the town.

Even the old residences, some of them had speakeasies in the basement.

Now, a lot of people write about prohibition, but they don't bring out

the fact that everybody was breaking the law because it was a thing to do.

Rent parties were given.

You would pay maybe 50 cents or a dollar. That entitled you to saltine

crackers with a piece of salami, and then they would have bathtub gin, which

meant that in their bathtubs they put a gallon of alcohol, and it was paid with

a lot of ice to paralyze your sense of taste, and it was colored with grenadine

to make it pink.

These were gay parties that we went to. Often, after the parties, we would go

home with people we chanced to meet there.

New York is a kind of a place that everybody comes to.

Harlem was a mecca for black people.

And so blacks came.

And since blacks come from everywhere, just like everybody else comes from

everywhere, the only difference was that blacks had a specific place to go to,

and that was Harlem.

And we had lots of clubs, lots of bars.

But my favorite one...

was the Garden of Joy up on a hill, I think 32nd Street. It's where the church

is now, Clayton Powers Church.

Abyssinian? Abyssinian, yeah. That was a hill.

And you had a beautiful time up there. Oh, girl, you had some time up there.

You see, those places were not gay, but they were open.

The whole atmosphere was open.

It was almost impossible not to know everybody that happened to pass through

Harlem at that time.

Black, white, grizzle, and gray. It doesn't make any difference.

Harlem's more exclusive clubs, featuring black performers, catered to white

tourists. However, the more adventurous whites, among the many homosexuals, were

welcome in black clubs and the freewheeling buffet flats.

I think one of the great attractions in Harlem was to go to Gladys Bentley's

little hideaway down in the basement where she played a piano.

Gladys Bentley was a very overt lesbian.

I don't think I'd ever seen Gladys in a skirt in my life.

She always wore pants and tuxedos.

During her stint at the Clam House, she went off to Atlantic City and married

her girlfriend.

Well, I met quite a few singers, mostly all of them, like Ethel Waters and Smith

and Hunter.

Did you know if any of them were in the life?

They were all in there. I wouldn't have been meeting them if they hadn't have

been in there because I wouldn't bother nobody that was.

I'd do more bothering with straight people now than I ever did in my life.

I never went in with straight people because when you do, you get yourself in

trouble. Where are we going?

Well, you said you wanted to go slumming, so I picked a place to eat in

the village.

Only wild poets and anarchists eat there. It's pretty tough.

That's the ancient culture, the old Gnostic Bohemian culture, which existed

in the carnival world, in the black world, in Harlem in the 20s, on Times

Square certainly, in Berlin, the Cabaret Berlin that we read about in books and

see in movies. That old culture exists since primordial days.

The bohemian subculture was a pressure cooker advancing unconventional ideas.

Here homosexuals, cast out of genteel society, found a comfortable world in

which to create.

Many of America's important thinkers emerged from this homosexual

underground, including Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barnet, Langston Hughes,

Margaret Anderson, Tennessee Williams, and Gertrude Stein.

In the United States, between 1875 and 1940, there were more than 500

novels with lesbian content published.

And of course, with gay male literature, there's five times as much during the

same period of time. Literally thousands of books.

Oh, I had them all.

And even to this day, all the books are mine.

Tell me about your lesbian novels that you like. Oh.

Well, first I'll start. You know how I started.

The Well of Loneliness.

From that on, everything that came past, I read it.

The 20s saw a wave of lesbian-themed books and plays like the best-selling

The Well of Loneliness and the hit Broadway play The Captive.

Both were declared obscene, and the ensuing censorship struggles made

homosexuality a major topic of public discourse.

Radcliffe Hall's appeal overturned the decision for publishers, but New York

State outlawed overt references to homosexuality on the stage.

Controversial plays like Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour were

tolerated as long as the word lesbian was not mentioned.

In Hollywood, a film version of Oscar Wilde's Salome was produced with a

purportedly all-gay cast.

at the bottom of our garden.

You cannot think how beautiful they are.

They all stand up and sing when the fairy king and queen come lightly

floating down upon their crown.

But the censorship forces eventually prevailed.

And by 1935, the motion picture code banned all references to homosexuality.

The hard times of the 1930s led to political and social unrest.

Riots broke out in Harlem.

Unions fought pitched battles for recognition.

Families disintegrated as men abandoned their wives and children in

unprecedented numbers, and both the radical left and right swelled their

ranks. These were times of the Great Depression, and there was much

discrimination, much social discontent.

In 1929, when I arrived in New York, I was invited to a small dinner party

where Dr.

Hirschfeld, the sexologist who was the speaker that evening, and after dinner,

he addressed the group telling of changes that were being brought about in

Germany. He made quite an impact.

He had worked so that men could dress as women if they wished, if they were

properly identified.

Regrettably, later, that boomerang, all these registered men were... put it,

concentration camps with Jews.

The rise of the Nazis obliterated the early homosexual and feminist movements

in Germany and propelled the United States into a war that would

dramatically alter the lives of American homosexuals.

It was a war on, and we were all very, very patriotic.

When December 7th came, everybody was expected to do something.

Since there was no one else, I felt that it was my duty.

to join the service. As soon as they began taking women into the army, I

joined it.

I can't say that I was such a patriot that I was glad to join. I did not want

to get in there and get shot at.

On the other hand, certainly World War II was something that really the country

was behind so that you had at least everybody behind you.

They come from every walk of life. By the 100,000, they're assembling at camps

and naval training stations.

To these young men comes a radical change in their way of life, as home

ties are broken and families, friends, and sweethearts are left behind.

Quickly, they adapt themselves to Army and Navy routine.

Physical conditioning, discipline, military training with wholesome leisure

time activity build the high morale which is essential to strong fighting

men. My first assignment in the Army was in the induction station.

in Fort Snelling, which became instantly called the Seduction Station.

And I found that all of the people I had known in the gay bars in Minneapolis and

St. Paul were all officers who were running this Seduction Station.

Recruits would be lined up by the thousands as they would be each morning

outside our windows.

All of us would rush to the windows and look out and express great sorrow that

all of these beautiful boys were going to be killed or maimed or something in

the war.

Well, one of the worst of the stereotypes, when it's really a lie, is

that all homosexuals are effeminate and you're not really a man, you're more

like a girl.

And so a lot of us at that time who were gay had to prove our manhood. And so I

joined the toughest, most masculine military organization in the country,

and that was the Marine Corps.

The Marine Corps builds men.

I was very, very much aware that I was unathletic. As I say, I could not throw

a ball, I could not catch one.

Basketball was my complete undoing because I would kick it when I dribbled.

And in such things as like trying to throw grenades, it became more than

obvious. I remember once in grenade practice, it fell on my toe, which was

rather embarrassing.

So I kind of reacted to that by being a company mascot or something. The only

thing I could do was laugh about it, which I did, and I was reasonably well

liked.

I found that there was a tolerance for lesbianism if they needed you. If you

had a job to do that was a specialist kind of a job, or if you were in a

theater of operations where bodies were needed, then they tolerated anything

just about.

The battalion that I was in was probably about 97% lesbian.

We were all over the place.

And one day I got called into my commanding general's office, and it

happened to be Eisenhower at the time.

And he said, it's come to my attention that there may be some lesbians in the

WAC battalion.

I'm giving you an order to ferret those lesbians out, and we're going to get rid

of them.

And I looked at him, and then I looked at his secretary who was standing next

to me, and I said, well, sir, if the general pleases.

sir, I'll be happy to do this investigation for you, but you have to

know that the first name on the list will be mine.

And he kind of was taken aback a bit, and then this woman standing next to me

said, sir, if the general pleases, you must be aware that Sergeant Phelps's

name may be second, but mine will be first.

And then I looked at him, and I said, sir,

You're right. There are lesbians in the WAC battalion.

And if the general is prepared to replace all the file clerks, all the

section commanders, all of the drivers, every woman in the WAC detachment, and

there were about 980-something of us, then I'll be happy to make that list.

But I think the general should be aware that among those women are the most

highly decorated women in the war.

There have been no cases of illegal pregnancies.

There have been no cases of AWL.

There have been no cases of misconduct. And as a matter of fact, every six

months since we've been here, sir, the general has awarded us a commendation

for meritorious service.

And he said, forget the order.

It was a good battalion to be in.

At that time, men were not allowed to show affection to each other, at least

not to the point of touching.

except maybe, you know, the hand on the shoulder or the kind of boisterous

excesses that men go into when they're getting a little intoxicated. I

certainly felt something very strong. There was a certain amount of affection,

but it was a very butch kind of affection. There's no way in the world

that they would have defined this as being gay activity, and I couldn't

either.

Of course, when you're actually in combat, the whole focus is on living and

the raw nerve edge of everything.

Most of your life is reflex action.

But more intense expression of feelings were permitted then.

And I'd gone out with two rather close friends. We were maybe three miles from

the front lines.

And it was a little town in Germany.

We'd had a lot of casualties.

And I went out and we got very drunk.

And coming back...

Mertz and I started kind of playing with each other. I remember it was on a

bridge.

And we actually kind of had sex.

I mean, it was with Smitty, the third person over there. Oh, come on, guys,

you're drunk, you know, stop it, all of those things.

But the traumatic thing about it is that both of those guys were dead in three

days.

Smitty had been hit with a sniper in a foxhole right next to mine, and Mertz

had gotten...

There was some artillery right in his stomach.

And all of this within a week of having had this experience.

While the war raged on, radical social changes were seen on the home front.

As the workforce swelled with women, lesbians gained economic independence.

Hundreds of homosexual bars sprung up as gay military personnel flooded the port

cities. Dayton women are marching to war.

Yes, in every essential wartime activity.

In the factories and at the airfields, Dayton women are helping to keep the

wheels of industry turning.

It was World War II, and everyone that didn't have a perforated eardrum or flat

feet was off defending our country at some place or another.

So there were an awful lot of unmarried women, engaged women, single women, all

kinds of women. And remember, a lot of them had moved to the cities because

that's where all these jobs were that needed to be filled.

Well, all the women were hired in the defense industries and they had to wear

slacks and have short hair, no skirts. They were dangerous around machinery.

So it became common that when to and from work, they were wearing slacks on

the street.

But naturally, they began to earn money and naturally they achieved some degree

of independence.

They left the house or the home. And for young women, you could leave home

without being pregnant.

It wasn't the first time that anybody could really successfully do that. The

sheer matter of where to live presents a formidable problem in Dayton.

Rooms, beds, floor space, all jam-packed, overflowing.

We was all bunched up together all the time.

Most of the women that I met had husbands, but they would go with women

just the same.

They'd just come out a little more.

They did the same thing when the men was home, but they wouldn't let nobody know

it. That's why I know one half of the world is queer, gay, one half of

it. And those that's fighting us, who will admit the truth, they're doing the

same thing.

Certainly it brought a lot more people from the hinterlands out into conditions

where they weren't living in small towns, where they were freer.

where they met other people, where they got in, male and female, got into same

-sex close relationships and developed friendships.

On the nights out, groups of soldiers may go looking for women and end up

finding one another.

I miss your voice and the touch of your hand

My buddy, my buddy,

your buddy misses me.

I got a gal in Kalamazoo.

Don't want to boast, but I know she's a toast.

A Kalamazoo, zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo.

Yeah, so come by.

We met a lot of people. We became aware of our own kind, our own society

congregated there. And I think that had a lot to do with the increase in

population for the gay community in those metropolitan areas.

Certainly, when I came out in San Francisco into the bars, there were 20

or 30 active bars that I found at any time, although most of them were short

-lived.

Very few of them were gay-owned or gay-run, but as long as they lasted,

they were packed.

The first club I went to was the Lakeshore Club, which was primarily a

lesbian club.

It was a place, of course, to meet.

And it was the first year I came out, and so I was there a lot.

And there was a man on the door, and you didn't get in unless you looked gay, or

they knew you, or you were brought by somebody who was gay.

There were the gay girls' clubs and the gay boys' clubs, but you were never kept

out because you were either sexed. I guess I went to see Carol every place

that he appeared.

Wrote most of my material.

There isn't anybody in this world who can get me to say one word about her.

She's what she is, and of course, she'll never mend.

She's an intro, ultra extrovert, but so what?

She's my most intimate friend.

I know she's diseased. I know she's insane.

I know she can only be appeased with a lash and champagne.

I know that Mr. Wellesley fired her for her actions with the girls, and I know

it inspired her to poison her mother. She wanted the pearls.

I know all about the stallion that she left too weak to walk, and I know...

about Miss Legallium, though that was only talk.

In fact, I know a lot of things that I could tell if I would. But a gossip I

never will end. Wild horses couldn't drag one word from my mouth. After all,

she's my most intimate friend.

Carol Davis was a very important entertainer.

But, you know, entertainers are always a little bit like God. You know, they

stand off.

A different light shines on them.

You must be ladies.

Don't worry, this town.

Merrily we appear on the scene.

Hostesses of the stage door canteen.

Entertaining soldiers who are going off to war.

Glad to be of service, but we could do much more.

We could do more for the boys.

And greatly add to their joy.

But we don't get very far. We take an oath when we enlist to never be found.

We're noodling around with a soldier.

And of course, they were all the famous drag queens.

Rather than put them in the regular army out there in the trenches or whatever,

they put them in this drag show.

And they've traveled all over the United States, and then they made a movie. And

it was all a big hit.

In that sense, they were out of the closet, but of course nobody in the army

or anything would ever hint that these men were gay men. Of course not.

They were just in a show, just entertaining.

The effect of World War II was really, truly profound.

Our country will never again be what it was before that war because gay people

began to recognize that there were others like themselves in other parts of

the country, even though we were totally closeted then. At least there was a

certain perception that we weren't at least geographically isolated.

Washington is jubilant.

and in chicago more than a million sing and dance in the street in the biggest

celebration the windy city has ever seen joy is unconfined

at the end of the war many of the lesbians

and gay men who served their country settled in the port cities there they

could be anonymous and distance themselves from their critical families

But most important was the companionship they sought within America's growing

urban gay population.

And what does he want?

Most of all, he wants a job, a stake in the American future.

Male veterans reclaimed their jobs and received economic and educational

benefits under the GI Bill.

But women were forced back into traditional roles, losing the economic

gains made during the war.

Liberal ideas in the arts and sciences began to emerge against this backdrop of

growing social conservatism.

There was a period of about two years following the war, the first couple of

years that I was in college, where there was a big upsurge of liberalism. Now I

can't necessarily tie this, you know, with the gay scene, but there were, oh,

the beginnings of kind of civil rights movements.

Noises were being made.

In the 40s, the bomb dropped.

In the 40s, the entire planet was threatened biologically.

In the 40s, there was a recovery from the total breakdown of all morality in

the concentration camps.

For those of us who were homosexual, it was suddenly the realization, why are we

being intimidated by a bunch of jerks who don't know anything about life?

Who are they to tell us what we feel and how we're supposed to behave?

And why take all that bullshit and why not just sort of dish it back and start

talking openly?

Late at night, at theaters that were off the beaten track, most of the time the

theater marquees were turned off and it was fairly dark out front, and they'd

show these fairly scratchy black and white films on the screen that turned

out to be Kenneth Anger films that did have gay overtones, sometimes more than

overtones, and I guess they were the forerunners of what gay films turned out

to be.

The old Bohemian wide-open mind tradition burst out through its bounds

and went out into mass culture sometime in the late 40s and early 50s.

Liberation of the Word included a number of books that may not be remembered now

that were instrumental in opening up American sensibility.

Among those books were Gore Vidal's City in the Pillar and Donald Corey's The

Homosexual in America.

First of all, it was a cultural scene, Kerouac and Burroughs, and Herbert

Hunke, who was a friend of Burroughs, now a writer, then a hustling junkie on

Times Square, who was working with Dr. Kinsey. As Kinsey's informant for the

floating population of Times Square, so that Burroughs and Kerouac and myself

and Hunke and many friends...

are integrated into the first statistics of the kinsey report homosexuality was

thought to be a comparatively rare phenomenon until kinsey came along and

provided very good evidence that actually there were of course roughly 20

million gay men and women and that was important and it was important because

they gave great hope to gay people and lesbians because they for the first time

realized that they were not a tiny minority, but actually a very sizable

proportion of the population.

The feeling that was created was you could walk down the street and, oh my

heavens, one out of 10 or one out of 20 or whatever it might be, might be having

those feelings, might be having those experiences.

It really shook people up and made it impossible for them to think about

homosexuality in the old ways, that it was something way over there.

But then there was such a turnaround in the country, you know, come shortly

after the 48 elections and then in came Senator McCarthy and all of a sudden the

country slipped into the dark ages.

You can run away if you like.

You have been here trying to smear the staff of this committee.

The young men who have been working to uncover communists have been too long.

Apparently every time anybody says anything against anybody working for

Senator McCarthy, he is murdering them and he's accusing them of communism.

People were looking for enemies of all sorts everywhere, not just communists,

but queers, anything, anybody who's deviant. People who were dissidents of

any kind, sexually, socially, politically, what have you.

And they were looking for people like this under every bed and around every

corner and behind every door.

It was a whole different spirit. Right after the big business about the

Hollywood 10, we began to hear in 48 and 49 that they were beginning to kick guys

out of the State Department for being gay.

and they were kicking guys out of the army they were kicking them out of the

navy they were making the connection between communists and gay people and

making the suggestion that the that the soviet union was using gay people as

spies because they were being afraid of blackmail and so they were a danger in

the federal government and in the state department i came to the department in

1951 and i was involved there in continuing investigations the easiest

target

for foreign intelligence sources, for foreign intelligence agencies, was sex.

Women and girls are sent out, according to carefully laid plans, to brothels, to

low cafes and bars, and to the streets, where they spread venereal disease and

disorder among those upon whom the defense of the nation depends.

Agents far more dangerous than the women and girls they exploit take a large part

of the money collected in this saddest... and most degrading

enterprise.

McCarthy made one feel that a gay person was like a Mata Hari.

Did you think this came from a pixie?

Question, did you think this came from a pixie? The counsel, for my benefit,

defined, I think he might be an expert on that, what a pixie is. Yes, I should

say... I should say, Mr. Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy.

Hearings were held with respect to developing an executive order

screening personnel coming into government.

And this executive order was Executive Order 10450.

EO 10-450 outlined the fact that a person who had a top-secret clearance

could not continue after having acknowledged involvement in homosexual

activities. Your first year is a probationary year, and there's normally

an investigation during that year, and I was called in and they

said, we have information that leads us to believe that you are homosexual.

Do you have any comment?

And I said, what's the information?

And they said, we can't tell you. That would reveal our sources.

The sources of our information on these people generally came

from a co-participant.

And we were fortunate in that when we interviewed some of these people, which

we were required to do before they left the department, that they furnished us

with a long list of names.

of others who were similarly involved and in those days homosexuality as such

was uh with no further reason or rationale was a basis for exclusion from

the civil service and by the end of the year sort of as a christmas present i

was out we offer them first of all an opportunity of facing a board hearing

with the department before they went uh we offer them a chance an opportunity to

resign i don't think we had 10 hearings And we separated 900 to 1

,000 employees of the Department of State.

So I proceeded to appeal administratively through the formal

appeal procedures, which went up a few steps.

And then I always follow avenues till their end. So I appealed it ultimately

up into the White House. It got nowhere there. I attempted to appeal it to the

House and Senate civil service committees, which were not terribly

sympathetic.

Down through the years, we've had many, many cases, but only one case, to my

knowledge, where an individual, after his interviews with us, he went out and

committed suicide.

Now, Mr.

Adams, subversive homosexuals in

the Air Force and in the Navy.

I was in service during the McCarthy era, 51, 2, and 3.

The OSI started an investigation of me because some of the women I had been

associating with were under investigation for homosexuality.

There was no time of the day when they wouldn't come and get me. It didn't make

any difference where I was. And when they had me in the office, there were

always three men there. One of them would ask the questions, one would watch

my reactions, and the other one would make notes.

And I'm not easily intimidated, but I was totally intimidated by these men.

This had been going on for about 10 or 11 months.

And I knew I was at an emotional, a physical, and a mental breaking point. I

knew that it was either tell them and get out now or see myself in some

hospital someplace.

In the end, when I finally agreed to sign the paper that they wanted me to

sign and told my story, I had to incriminate this woman sexually with

myself. Their promises were that I would get a general discharge and that...

they would make no contact at all with this family because it was important

that her parents not know anything about this well needless to say that both of

these conditions were violated i got neither a general discharge nor did they

keep their distance from that family in town and to this day that girl does will

not talk to me i entered the service as an integrated personality totally

adjusted confident capable and i came out of the service

disintegrated and with no self-image, no prospects for a secure or profitable

tomorrow, and in a sort of limbo.

Today is a high point in the romance of Bob and Mary.

For them, the future looks bright.

I assumed, of course, I had to get married.

It was just so pervasive. The entire economy was geared to this. This was the

big period of growth.

The Eichler homes were all going up around Palo Alto, where I was at the

time. It was burgeoning into greater suburbia.

Three-bedroom homes were the thing, and you wondered how you were going to get

your four children into three-bedroom homes.

And it was just so accepted that almost everybody that I knew bought into this.

Little boxes on the hillside. Little boxes made of ticky tacky. Little boxes

on the hillside. Little boxes all the same.

There's a pink one and a green one and a blue one and a yellow one and they're

all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.

I tried marriage.

I tried to

Act like I saw all other women acting.

The hand with the soft touch holds her man in the palm of her hand. Because a

man is a soft touch for that soft touch.

One of the reasons that gay people marry, because there is a certain amount

of social pressure to do that. Now, that social pressure...

was a lot stronger 20 or 30 years ago than it is now. And 100 years ago, it

was virtually mandatory.

You were expected.

You either were a charity case in your own family or you married because there

were very few things you could do. This is for women.

In retrospect, I would have to say that it's homosexual panic.

But I'd certainly managed to convince myself at the time anyway that I was

doing it for all the appropriate reasons. I was in love. I wanted a

family.

This seemed to be the thing to do.

There was no acceptance.

You didn't have any of the security of being married. No family acceptance.

You couldn't go home and say, Mom, meet my wife or my husband or whoever.

In 1950, a time of severe political and social repression, America's first

organization of homosexuals, the Mattachine Society, was founded by a

small group of men, including Harry Hay and Chuck Rowlands.

We didn't know at that point, none of us knew, that there had ever been a gay

organization of any sort anywhere in the world before.

No, we did not. Absolutely no knowledge of that.

So he felt that we had to be very, very careful in everything that we did and

think about it very carefully, or we could make a mistake. And if we made a

mistake and got into the papers the wrong way, we could hurt the idea of a

movement for years to come. And we were terrified of doing that. The very first

gay meeting that grew into the movement as we know it today took place in

someone's apartment in Los Angeles. And I'm told they had the door locked and

the blinds drawn and a lookout posted for the police.

because they actually believed they could be arrested just for talking about

homosexuality. Gay was supposedly something you were ashamed of, and it

was, oh, that person is a queer, or even worse, you wouldn't even verbalize it.

It wouldn't be talked about.

So for the idea to think in terms of having rights or some kind, you just

didn't put two and two together. You know, you just slid by.

I found that there were only a few who were thinking beyond.

just having a good time or finding that personal lover.

I had an automatic reaction, and Harry Hay and others seem to have an automatic

reaction, that this is a social problem that needs to be dealt with.

I'm thinking of this in 48, and I write all this down.

Then I start looking for people who'll join me.

And I talk to hundreds of people at this point. And it's not until July of 1950

that I meet Rudy, and he takes one look at it and says, wow, me too.

I looked at it with delight and said, my God, I could have written this myself.

And that was the beginning of that.

It was my first opportunity to meet other gay men in a social setting and to

exchange with each other the pain and the agony that we've known.

And we helped each other come to the realization that we're not bad people,

we're good people.

In addition to sponsoring discussion groups and fighting police entrapment,

some members began America's first homosexual magazines,

Mattachine Review and One.

One and Mattachine Review were great, and I read them all the time. See, the

whole thing is they came literally out of the closet and socially out of the

closet and said, we are writing a magazine for gay people or for

homosexual people.

They were the only place in public where you could talk about it, about being

gay. Matt Asheen was instrumental in helping psychologist Evelyn Hooker find

well-adjusted homosexual men for her groundbreaking studies.

There was absolutely nothing in the psychiatric or psychological literature

which concerned well-functioning gay males.

I set out to collect a group of gay males.

who were functioning comparatively well, who were gainfully employed, were not in

psychiatric or psychological treatment.

And to compare them with heterosexual males, the results were fantastic,

namely that there were almost no numerical differences in the percentages

of men in either group who had superior adjustment, according to my expert

judges. A handful of women, including Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, began the

Daughters of Belitis. In 1955, it was a women's organization that offered a

supportive atmosphere for lesbians.

Education on the subject of lesbianism for its members, as well as for the

general public, was its primary goal.

The first organization in the movement that I...

joined was the Daughters of Belitis and I first ran into them in 1956 in San

Francisco. I had been told about the group by members of ONE and Mattachine

and I called up when I arrived in San Francisco and they invited me to a

meeting which was being held the following night and that next night I

was in a room with 12 other lesbians for the first time in my life and oh what a

thrill that was.

at great personal and professional risk to its publishers and often to its

readers the latter a lesbian publication was born all too often the journal was

the only link women had to others like themselves

They somehow got passed around from hand to hand and they got mailed from one

subscriber to another in some other part of the country who then sent it on to

someone else. And the organization's little offices, they'd have letters and

phone calls from isolated gay people, sometimes too afraid even to give a name

on the telephone, who would say things like, I'm just grateful for your

existence, for the sheer existence of groups of my own kind that I can turn

to. It took an enormous amount of courage in the 50s.

uh to openly declare oneself to be a lesbian or a gay male and

these people did so in the 50s

how were you i was myself it meant a hell of a struggle it meant having

to use violence and defend my own beliefs men were just

horrible

It came to the point where you couldn't even tap somebody on the back without

them saying queer and this and that. And this one particular woman decided to

ride with me and we were just having just a lot of fun until finally there

was mention of queer.

You have to develop a tough hide to take care of the soft interior.

We figured out

That a lot of people didn't like us and we had to protect ourselves so We got

together and we formed the Lee girls I can't remember if we named ourselves

after I can't remember who's Laura Liley or Robert E Lee or maybe both we got

together because we weren't gonna put up with being pushed around and if somebody

pushed one of us around we would Get him. You know, I thought I was different

And I didn't think it was anybody else. And then I went to reform school, and

there they were.

I mean, that was bulldagger's heaven to me. Shit. I was right at home.

But see, you didn't call me queer, not to my face. You do it in a moving

automobile, because I'd kick ass, see. I was young, dumb, and full of it. I went

in this bar with a good friend of mine, and they hassled my friend for being

with me, because I was pretty obvious, you know.

this bastard come over and he was gonna take a swing at my friend so i picked up

this big uh glass ashtray and i hit him on the head you know and it shattered it

couldn't even find a piece of splintered and blood flew like that

you know and he stood there for a second and i put my big boot right in his gut

and i went

and slammed him across the room, and he fell in a chair.

And the rest of those heterosexuals, they came over to his rescue,

towels and blood all over.

I said to my friend, let's get the hell out of here.

The women I ran with, we knew we were outsiders. We knew we were outside the

pale. We lived in the village. We were outsiders. We were dykes.

Right? A lot of us were artists.

We hated typing.

Right? We didn't want straight jobs.

Whatever we did, we were at the fringe.

Now, this, of course, was the 50s. It was like the gay girl's version of the

Beatniks. When I was growing up and anybody else in my age bracket were

growing up, most of our parents, when they found out we were gay, we were

excommunicated from the family or we were just totally dropped.

We weren't invited to a lot of family affairs.

My mother tore up my brother's wedding invitation to me because she didn't want

the queer coming to the wedding.

And there were a lot of things that happened like that to gay kids growing

up in the 50s and the 60s. About this time, Mary developed a sudden, strong

friendship with Lucille Williams.

It seemed that Mary could talk better with Lucille than with anybody. They had

absolutely no secrets from each other.

They were inseparable.

To Mary's mother, it seemed unnatural, this continual intimacy, this

concentration of affection on one not very unusual girl.

Oh, Lucille, wait a minute.

Ethel, we forgot about Ethel. We're going to have to bring Ethel. Oh, we

don't have to bring her. You know what she's like with boys and everything.

Mary, darling.

You're keeping Lucille from her dinner.

Oh, I was just leaving Mrs. Gibbs.

Well, bye. I'll see you tomorrow.

Okay, then. Bye.

Next, there was a crush on Ethel Hampton, senior girl tennis champion.

Mary seemed to have a real need to be stirred up about someone.

The girl I marry will probably be As butch as a

hunk of machinery The girl I idolize

will wear slacks with fly fronts, tailored shirts, and bow ties.

She'll walk with a swagger and wear short hair and keep me entranced with

her tomboy air.

Instead of cruising, I'll be using her

shoulder to lean on while snoozing.

A faint-hearted fairy.

the girl that I marry won't be.

In those days, you were either a butch or a femme because they were, I guess,

emulating straight society.

And so, you know, all the things that go along with that, either you're the

aggressive or you're a passive or whatever. So, of course, I chose the

butch. I'd already been a tomboy. I already was dressed in pretty masculine.

So then I went even further.

Actually, I was a piss-poor butch in Chicago.

The other butches used to criticize me because I wasn't butch enough, you know,

because I didn't act like a man. Actually, I would dress kind of

masculine, but I didn't really act that much like a man. And that was the thing.

You're supposed to act like a man or, you know, be the super lady one or the

other. A lot of times if you wanted to go take a girl out to a real nice

intimate dinner or whatever or go into a straight club to see a show but go in

as, like, dates or go to a drive-in, It always worked much better if one looked

more like the man and could pass as a man.

and chances are you wouldn't find a carload of straight guys pulling up next

to you and saying queer queer and then beat the out of you so if you look like

a man and tried to pass as a man you were safer you have to remember that the

lesbian gay girls because that's what we would call the gay girls population was

a reflection of what else was going on right around us and that was the era of

let's pretend this is the best of all possible worlds this is exactly what we

choose right this is it It's like nobody talked about racism. Right. So if

something happened to me in a bar, I couldn't count on anybody standing up

and covering my back.

A white lesbian would not stand up to cover my back. They may say, personally,

oh, isn't that too bad it happened to you? But not, hey, this shouldn't

happen, period.

In the 50s, homosexual men exhibited a great range of self-expression, from the

most masculine, who passed us straight, to the more flamboyant drag queens who

lived on the fringes of society.

But for all gay men, Camping It Up, the self-conscious parody of heterosexual

behavior and attitudes, played an important role.

Those that were the sissies, or those that were very open with being gay,

generally were the ones who accepted the feminine role, and the boyfriends and

the lovers and things were usually very masculine, and usually very closeted.

Well, I'd say, what a sissy I was.

And of course, there was blatant camping, because we were under so much

pressure. You don't see that kind of camping in gay bars now.

I do it because it makes me feel good.

I believe you should express what you are any way you want to.

I do it because I like when somebody says, oh God, you're gorgeous. Oh God,

you're gorgeous. I love that.

Who wouldn't?

time I almost had he was as gay as he could be but he

was much too gay for me I

always knew they grew palm trees bananas they always had

But you can imagine my surprise.

I found a Ponzi in Trinidad.

The gay young lad from Trinidad.

Oh, what a time I almost had.

I might have sold a few wild oats, but he preferred banana boats.

It's not as if the 50s were time.

of simply total desperation.

It depends who you were, where you were, how lucky you were, whether you were

lucky enough, for example, to meet a set of friends who were truly supportive.

And they just took me to their collective bosoms, so to speak, and boy,

was that fun.

And they took me to a girls' softball game, and of course I didn't care

anything about softball, but I sure liked watching all the girls run around

there in those shorts.

You could just go to any small town softball field and just wait.

Sooner or later, that's where they would all come.

What we'd do if we were in a strange place or we were lonely and we wanted to

make friends or something, we would just pick the likeliest looking people and

follow them. And then we would start laughing and giggling and following them

in the car and eventually they would notice. And they would either join in

the fun and let us follow them and we'd end up in a bar or wherever they hung

out and get to talking.

Or they would...

panic and take off and that would be the end of that and we'd be stuck until the

next Saturday.

We loved each other very much. We had a circle of supportive friends.

There were some bars that we could go to.

The bar scene was miserable. It's just nothing like it is today.

And when you say, did you find a bar to go to, it wasn't that easy at all back

then. Back in the 50s and 60s, they would back a paddy wagon up to the door.

and everybody, regardless of who they were.

My mother and father almost got caught.

They would use any excuse to arrest you, as

long as they knew you were gay. I mean, it was like they harassed the women by

their dress outfits.

They harassed the men if they looked a little nelly on the street, and they

just... push them just to get them to either mouth off or say hey leave me

alone the police would say okay you're resisting arrest now you go to jail

whatever so there was always a constant pressure being put on us It's almost

vigilante mentality is what it was. I mean, just this business of backing a

paddy wagon up, not one, but having two or three out there, and scooping

everybody out, taking them down, booking them, and then the next day, in at least

one of the newspapers, all of the names of the people that were booked at this

gay bar or that gay bar would be published, and people lost their jobs.

They were training really good-looking and young officers, you know, how to be

gay, how to appear gay.

You would even be approached.

you know with what's happening hoping that you would say anything to them

sexual or even hinting you know you didn't even just just heading to that

fact and you'd find yourself under arrest so watch out for the vice squad

breaking up that gang of mine any

personal expression particularly relating to genitals and eros and heart

that would that would threaten the authority of the state was illegal in

literature and art.

Porn, as they called it. There were a series of trials in the late 50s that

liberated the word, and that meant a whole spiritual liberation after that.

One of the early trials was the Howell trial in 56.

Allen Ginsberg's Howell, a book of poetry with graphic homosexual images,

was seized by the police.

The ACLU, with the help of literary figures, including Lawrence

Ferlinghetti, won this precedent-setting case.

So they lost, so we got a lot of publicity, so the books sold like

hotcakes, and the censors acted as publicists for a new sensibility.

Howell eventually became America's best-selling book of poetry. In 1958,

one magazine won a case against the Postal Service, which allowed all gay

publications use of the U.S. mail.

following the second world war really the entire publishing history in the

united states changed um paperback novels became very popular and along

with the rise of the paperback novels in general lesbian paperback originals

began to be published in enormous quantities there were thousands of them

between about 1950 and 1965 and they range from just uh incredible trash uh

books with titles like the twisted ones it's just you know a really trippy novel

and

at the same time though among those there were perhaps a hundred out of all

the thousands about a hundred that were written by uh women for women and books

like odd girl out by anne bannon that first appeared in in 1957.

uh is now really a classic novel in what they call the paperback genre my initial

acquaintance with any kind of lesbian literature came through a paperback

reissue of radcliffe hall's well of loneliness i suppose that's true for

lots of us i have a friend who said i used to stand in the stacks at the

library because i didn't have the courage to go up to the librarian and

check it out and i'd stand there and i'd cry and i'd read radcliffe hall so i

kind of did the same thing and um Then I found a novel called Spring Fire,

written by a writer named Vin Packer.

And she was contemporary, and this was in the mid-50s. And I wrote her a

letter, and she said, why don't you come up to New York, and I'll introduce you

to my publisher.

And I got myself to New York as fast as I could, with my manuscript in hand.

Odd Girl Out was the result.

In 1957, Odd Girl Out was Fawcett Gold Medals.

second best-selling paperback original title of the year.

I guess I was brought out, you might say, by an older woman, which was in the

form of one of Anne Bannon's books.

I picked up in the drugstore from coming home from school one day, and I picked

up this paperback, and I opened it up and said something about the young girl

and the older woman, and touched her leg or her breast or something, and she was

dancing, and oh my God, it sent a shiver of...

Whoo, excitement in my whole body that I had never experienced before.

She put an arm around Laura and squeezed her a little.

Laura was embarrassed and grateful at the same time.

It was so good.

After I read that book, I knew that's what I wanted.

I desired a woman.

I mean, that's what I wanted. What else was there?

And I can remember somebody saying that all the queers lived in Greenwich

Village in New York City.

That was the image.

where all the queers live as soon as i heard that i knew that's where i wanted

to live and a few months out of high school i was here the lesbians and gay

people were coming from philadelphia new jersey city this was during the summer

they were just coming from all over to be in new york city and cruise greenwich

village once i had a secret love

that lived within the heart

of me

Well, honey, when I went there, there was lesbians in the streets, in droves.

Women that looked like men, men that looked like women, right? Women with the

hair slicked back, doing the trip.

The femmes with the beehive.

I found myself a girlfriend.

You know, she was like the femme type, and I loved it.

And I really felt at peace, and I started having lovers easily.

because they were there to pick and choose from and seeing chicago there was

not that now i shout it from

the highest hill good evening ladies and

gentlemen and once again i welcome you on behalf of the working staff of the

black cats the moose

famous bohemian bar in the world.

Where are you from, sir?

Estabula, Ohio.

There must be at least one queen in Estabula, Ohio.

That's all I got to say.

And where are you from, sir?

You look gorgeous.

Mother's here.

It was a bohemian bar, which had the reputation also of being a gay bar.

And there was a pianist who would play gay songs, and there were a couple of

flouncy bartenders.

But basically, it was wide open for everybody. Anything goes. It was total

human tolerance.

My God, it's Jose.

Black Cat was not a bar.

It was a family.

Those were my friends.

And they took me in, and they took care of me. They fed me when I was

unemployed. They patted my hand when I was hurting from a love affair.

And will you ever forget that handsome black man who, and I would come to work

early to see him get ready.

He was tall and thin.

Women would come and sit at one end of the bar, and the men would sit at the

other. And this one, with his apron, not down to here, but just down here.

Oh, she was a gay girl.

The black cat helped to make homosexuals more visible in San Francisco, so much

so that in the 1959 race for mayor, challenger russell wolden attacked mayor

christopher for allowing the city to become a homosexual haven wolden's

strategy backfired and christopher was re-elected by a landslide but once

elected christopher declared war on the black cat and other gay bars the bar

owners organized themselves into a tavern guild and began to fight back

charging the police with extortion

Well, the Tavern Guild, they had an effect because politicians in the city

began to realize that there was a gay voting bloc, though it didn't develop

as such during that period of time. They lost in court and turned to the ballot

box. They ran the Black Cat's star attraction, the Nightingale of

Montgomery Street, Jose Soria, for city supervisor.

we had a campaign to vote for jose and i think he got something like 8 000 votes

what they were trying to do was to show the gay strength and it really didn't

work because even then and a secret ballot and everything people were afraid

to vote for jose because it was a gay candidate i've always told people

especially the young ones there's nothing wrong in being gay absolutely

nothing getting caught is where you pay the price

the fantastic effort that went on that did the groundwork for a lot of the gay

freedoms we have in our city today in our country and in our culture and a lot

of it did get going before stonewall but it was groundwork let us all

stand up for one more time give thanks for what

we are

and the 60s was the prototype of every single liberation movement in this

country that we are still dealing with. The crowd occupies every inch on the

lawns and under the trees, and there's a great swell of cheers to welcome Martin

Luther King to the speaker's podium, the man who stands as a symbol of all they

are fighting for.

I have a dream that one day this nation will

rise up, live out the true meaning of its... African Americans said, no more.

They refused to hide behind the stereotypes that we were supposed to

have. And we said, no good.

No good.

You know? And then everybody got the feeling, whatever their oppression was,

well, maybe I don't have to take this either.

I think that the connections between black liberation and women's liberation

and gay liberation are very deep.

Many of us who went south to work with Dr. King in the 60s, were gay.

I remember a plane going down from Chicago.

There were six priests and three of us were gay.

A lot of gay people who could not come out for their own liberation could

invest those same energies in the liberation of black people. You need to

begin with a movement, which is what black power and the civil rights

movement was. Then immediately within it, you are going to get those people.

whose differences are not being articulated, which is, right, us.

So then there is immediately another step. In the 60s, there was a distinct

change in the temper and the tempo of the gay movement.

partly as a result of the black civil rights movement militancy. We began to

get more militant in the gay movement.

We began to see that the problem of homosexuality is not really gay people's

problem. It's a problem of the social attitudes of the people around us.

And we had to change their attitudes, and that in turn would help us with our

self-image. The white gay people who had an investment in the civil rights

movement had the experience by then of...

of liberation movement, of confrontational techniques, of

nonviolent struggle, and began to use these same techniques on behalf of their

own movement.

1965 was our big picketing year.

We had marched across the street and proceeded to picket right over there for

two hours.

We had no idea what the police would do or how they would behave, so we

scheduled the whole thing without any notice to anybody.

Had nothing happen, nobody threw rocks at us.

It was magnificently successful.

And the State Department, of course, had been really zeroed in on by McCarthy a

good 12, 15 years before.

And that's where more firings, I think, had occurred than any other one single

agency. And so we felt it was appropriate to pick it. By that time, we

had our procedures down pat and had sent out a news release a week or so in

advance. And by sheer good luck, Secretary of State Rusk...

was having a news conference the night before.

Well, I understand that we're being picketed by a group of homosexuals.

The policy of the department is that we do not employ homosexuals

knowingly, and that if we discover homosexuals in our department, we

discharge them. One of the major successes of the gay movement in the

1960s was our breakthrough into mainstream publicity.

According to Kinsey's estimate, There are about 200,000 homosexuals in the Los

Angeles area. We're going to talk about those people tonight and about the

problem they present to the community at large.

You'll hear from a psychiatrist, a police official, and a homosexual.

Name, please?

Curtis White. Your occupation?

I'm an office worker.

Are you a homosexual, Mr. White?

Yes. I'd like to ask you, does your family know that you're a homosexual?

They didn't until tonight.

Do you think they're likely to learn about your homosexuality as a result of

this program?

I'm almost certain they will, and I'm quite certain that I will probably lose

my job as a result of the program, too.

Well, then may I ask why you agreed to appear on this program?

I hope that through this means I can be of some use to someone else other than

myself. As much publicity as possible, that was the whole idea, to crack that

shield of invisibility that had always made it difficult for us to get our

message across.

The majority of gay people in the 60s were terribly concerned with the image

of the homosexual.

The men had to wear suits and ties, and the women all had to wear dresses and

heels. I think nylons even.

The more conservative elements, their basic feeling was, well, we're fighting

the federal government for jobs, therefore we have to look employable by

the federal government.

Many of us accepted the idea that if we dress properly, if we behave properly,

if we didn't make waves, if we didn't draw attention to ourselves, people

would accept us by not knowing who we were.

And we gradually, some of us, began to take the position that we had to assert

ourselves. One of the more militant assertions put forward by Frank Kameny

and other homosexual leaders was the idea that gay people were not mentally

ill. Even within the movement, this concept provoked intense debate.

It created quite a stir.

It's hard for young people today to imagine, as little as 20 years ago, 100

gay people sitting around arguing over whether or not they should say that they

weren't mentally ill.

We can debate what is an illness or whether it is an illness or not. I

happen to subscribe to the belief that it is a tragic illness.

neurosis the same as many other neuroses.

Every psychiatric viewpoint treated homosexuality as psychologically

pathological. I taught that viewpoint until I learned better.

Homosexuality, as it was still called by the therapist, was a character disorder.

My only hope of achieving, quote, health, and my only hope of having a

happy life was to change my sexual orientation.

and for as i remember it nearly two years uh i not only went without sex but

i gave up a lover a man i had been seeing at the time under the pressure of

the group and see this process that you go through as a young lesbian of finding

everything in society not fitting you you have a choice to become

sick and mentally ill or to trust yourself and fly with that well i

decided to trust myself and fly with that the assumption is that women

shouldn't like math they shouldn't like science they're supposed to like only

home economics when there are hundreds of thousands of women all over this

country and all over the world uh who happen to like things they're not

supposed to like and the day is coming we you know we're gonna like them we're

gonna do them uh we're gonna take our freedom by any means necessary i think

the women's movement provided a safe haven for a lot of women who were

struggling with their sexuality

and might not have even known they were struggling with their sexuality.

I didn't stay home and cook and have babies and marry a man, and didn't

identify in particular with people who did.

They knew that there was something different about them, and they didn't

quite fit out there in that heterosexual world.

And so they came into, like I did, came into the women's movement. Part of me

came because the politics sounded right, but there was a secret little part that

said, maybe I'll find... a woman to love and i think that happened for a lot of

women i know that many lesbians were the early beginnings of now and now was the

women's movement then i mean that was it there was nothing else and yes the

lesbians were in the forefront of the very beginning of now and and still are

except nobody knows when the

hippies came on this real liberating thing because they started wearing

whatever they wanted to and then that felt made gay people feel freer to to do

likewise the flower children came along in 1967 and turned into the hippie

movement and in one given day

bouffant hairstyles went out and everyone was ironing their hair. I mean,

it was, you know, boom, boom. The role playing was not as obvious.

It wasn't important.

Everybody was just sort of turning into being a guy.

I think one of the things I realized, in order for me to be homosexual, it didn't

mean that I was woman's replacement.

It didn't mean that I had to be femme. It just meant that I was a guy who liked

guys.

Then all of a sudden time magazine comes out with this article San Francisco the

city of love there's free love on the street

Yeah,

the fascinating period actually

There was an organization called the Psychedelic Venus Church in Berkeley,

which was a gay church.

And that organization used to co-sponsor parties in the city.

And they were orgies, basically.

You would walk in and you could take your clothes off and kind of put them in

a bag.

There'd be wine. People would bring their grass in and what have you. Very,

very new scene.

Certainly new to me and quite fascinating.

The revolution in this country is in fact...

The latter part of the 60s, in gradually escalating fashion, were a period of

enormous ferment.

It was a period of enormous social turmoil.

which had its impact, of course, on gays as well. We were living in the larger

society.

In the black community, it was really bad because

almost every time you would walk out of the house, you were being stopped.

I really think that it was the young gays that were putting up the biggest

fight. And it was sort of like, well, I guess it's okay to fight.

America.

In order to survive, we steal, cheat, lie, forge, fight, hide, and steal.

Here I've seen lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent.

of political feeling especially among young people and of course when the the

night of the stonewall riots came along just everything came together at that

one moment people quite often ask well what was special about that night friday

june 27 1969 there was no one thing that was special about it was just everything

coming together one of those moments in history where if you were there you just

knew this is it this is what we've been waiting for

They decided, you know, we've had enough of this kind of thing. We're going to

fight back. The patrons, instead of timidly taking it, they actually hurled

rocks and bottles right back at the police.

And the rioting went on for a couple of days.

The stone wall coming all the way up and down and in across the bottom. Well, the

next few nights really were a repetition of the rioting. All of a sudden, a lot

of gay people would appear on the streets.

in this whole area not just in front of the stone wall fire alarm boxes were

pulled trash cans were set on fire so there was a chance of gay power i

remember that and i felt the injustice and it was that expression of feeling

that radiated across the country it gave me the courage to also come out and say

no more as far as my work was concerned as far as my private life is concerned

and that's what i really really became a gay activist and it was helped by that

movement the spirit of that movement carried all the way out to the west

coast wouldn't you agree uh mars yes yes

I'm gay and I'm proud, I'll sing it aloud, I'm not afraid to be me anymore.

Tell your sister, tell your brother, it's okay to love one another.

Sing it aloud, I'm gay and I'm proud.

The tide really turned at the time of Stonewall. A large number of gay people

who had not known about the movement before heard about it and said, I'm

going to join this.

or I'm going to start something of my own.

By

joining and

uniting all of us, we have really gained power.

And even in small communities, whether it's...

kalamazoo or timbuctoo our voices are heard there and from the time of

stonehenge to stonewall this has been the struggle and we're winning

if your disposition's gay be mighty glad you're made that way

don't frown cause your world's upside down

why should you be thought a fool for not conforming to the rule it has its

advantages abound now the ladies are the fairest sexes

everybody knows Their charms are emphasized in ads and even moving

picture shows. I can't convince the fellows I'm not Daffy in the head, cause

I'm saving all my kisses for the little girls instead.

Mama Nature played it smart when she tied a string around my heart and said,

no, no, no, no to me.

my kind of lovin's lots of fun but i'm glad when all is said and done there's

no no responsibility

Now science claims that likes repel and opposites attract.

But since I've been in Hollywood, I sure don't know that that's a fact. When e'er

I see a likely, likely swayin' down the street, I must curb my natural urge to

whistle at each one I meet.

Never act as though you mind if people sometimes seem unkind. Keep smilin'

though you may be blue.

And no matter what you are, if you hitch your wagon to a star, you'll find your

share of happiness too.