This is the second part of a four-part series. For part I, click here.
The riots were over. Fires in trash cans still smoldered. The shards of broken glass strewn across Christopher Street glinted in the new day’s sunlight.
WE HOMOSEXUALS PLEAD WITH OUR PEOPLE TO PLEASE HELP MAINTAIN PEACEFUL AND QUIET CONDUCT ON THE STREETS OF THE VILLAGE
-MATTACHINE
These were the words written outside the Stonewall Inn by the long-established moderate gay group, the Mattachine Society.
Mattachine’s focus was less on public demonstrations and more on swaying bureaucratic institutions in favor of gay rights. Behind the scenes, they lobbied healthcare professionals, policy wonks, and city officials on issues like housing and employment discrimination, as well as fighting the distinction of homosexuality as a mental illness.
Their work was important, but it was slow and growing more ineffective.
Mattachine continued to plead for nonviolence on the streets of the Village, but the explosion had already happened.
Organizing begins.
Queer people were angry.
The poet Allen Ginsberg noticed at the time:
They’ve lost that wounded look the fags all had ten years ago.
In an interview with Eric Marcus of Making Gay History, Sylvia Rivera said:
People were very angry for so long. I mean, how long can you live in the closet?
Martha Shelley was a young lesbian feminist in a leadership role for the Daughters of Bilitis, another long-established lesbian rights organization. Realizing the opportunity for momentum, she proposed a demonstration to Craig Rodwell, the leader of HYMN and an organizer for the Annual Reminder.
They agreed that if Mattachine would be willing to use its influence to sponsor a march, the pair could pull it off.
Mattachine agreed to hold a forum at the East Village disco Electric Circus on July 6.
But Craig still had work to do with the Annual Reminder on July 4—the last Reminder that would ever be.
Reminder Day.
As we mentioned in part I of this series, the Reminder was no-nonsense. Frank Kameny, a lifelong gay activist and president of Mattachine Washington, insisted on a dress code, pre-approved signs, no chanting, and absolutely no PDA. The demonstration was sponsored by the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations, so gay and lesbian groups from across the eastern seaboard were in attendance.
Craig was tasked with bussing demonstrators from New York to Philadelphia, where the demonstration was held.
Sure enough, he arrived to the demonstration with 40-odd New Yorkers, but with Stonewall only a week before, their outrage was more palpable than their fellow demonstrators.
Gay Liberation Front member Bill Weaver recalled:
The New York people were much more militant than anyone else. Two of the lesbians started to hold hands and [Frank Kameny] went over and slapped their hands, and he said “You can’t do that! You can’t do that!” The New York people sort of caucused and freaked out.
Craig was enraged by Frank’s actions, and called him an “Auntie Tom.”
He warned Kameny:
If you don’t change, you’re going to be left behind.
Then, Craig ran over to his partner, Fred Sargeant, and they joined hands in defiance of the PDA policy.
Craig shouted:
Come on! Be proud homosexuals! Not Auntie Toms!
Other same-sex couples followed suit. The demonstration had been successfully hijacked.
A Necessary Interlude: A Passing of the Torch.
It would be an oversimplification to brand Frank Kameny as the “bad guy” working against the post-Stonewall movement. His actions were an embodiment of resistance to a newfound militancy that happens generationally within nearly every movement toward liberation.
In fact, Frank himself had been on the other side of it more than a decade before.
Kameny was fired from his government job as an astronomer in 1957, after an arrest for cruising. The government saw Queer people as susceptible to blackmail, and anyone suspected of “immoral” behavior was purged. Frank was a casualty of that.
To oppose the move, Frank came out and further claimed that, because he was out, he was no longer susceptible to blackmail for his sexuality. He would go on to write a famously articulate brief to the Supreme Court on the matter, though it was a fight he would ultimately lose.
But the moment radicalized him, and he would spend the rest of his life fighting for gay rights.
Donald Webster Cory—a pseudonym—was a mentor of Frank’s and deeply closeted. His 1951 book The Homosexual in America was a national bestseller that no one dared read in public. It remains one of Queer history’s most influential texts, arguing for recognition and respect for gay people.
But he and Frank were split on a major issue. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) classified homosexuality as a mental illness—a distinction Frank believed should be smashed, arguing that the whole gay rights movement would rest on the essential fact that homosexuals were not sick.
Cory felt the opposite: that homosexuals, though deserving of respect, were disturbed and that homosexuality was not a natural variant. He argued that labeling homosexuality as a sickness would protect gay people from being blamed for their sexuality.
This eventually led to a schism within Mattachine, in which Frank said to Cory:
You have become no longer the vigorous Father of the Homophile Movement, to be revered, respected, and listened to, but the senile Grandfather of the Homophile Movement, to be humored and tolerated at best; to be ignored and disregarded usually; and to be ridiculed at worst.
Perhaps this was on Frank’s mind when he sat down to write a letter to Craig after the disastrous Annual Reminder.
He wrote:
I am genuinely sorry about the disagreement which surfaced at the demonstration. ‘Love-ins’—homosexual and/or heterosexual, both—have their place; so do picketing demonstrations. Neither is likely to be effective, and both are more likely to be ineffective, if they are mixed.
Frank went on to chastise Craig for taking his opposition to the press, arguing that disagreements should be settled in the “living room.” It was Craig’s partner, Fred, who would respond, rejecting the apology.
But the new movement hadn’t seen the last of Frank.
Electric Circus.
Two days after the Reminder—on July 6—Craig, Martha, and other young organizers showed up to Electric Circus for a meeting of people “tired of raids, Mafia control, and checks at the front door” of gay bars.
Electric Circus was a straight establishment, but the owners were thrilled by the turnout. Other than one heckler who shouted “goddamn faggots” as Mattachine New York director Dick Leitsch took the stage, it was a notable moment of integration between straight and gay patrons.
They wrangled with how to move forward. Randy Wicker, who would become the lifelong roommate and friend of Marsha P. Johnson, ironically said he didn’t believe “the way to win public acceptance was to go out and form chorus lines of drag queens kicking your feet up at the police.”
One young man present said:
All I know is that I’ve been in this movement for three days and I’ve been beaten up three times.
Leitsch asked who would be in favor of holding a march, and every single hand went up.
The march committee would evolve into the Mattachine Action Committee (MAC), a younger subset of the Mattachine Society.
But it wouldn’t be long before MAC fell apart, once again due to ideological differences between veteran activists and young radical organizers.
Mattachine Action Committee.
At first, MAC was allowed its independence, using Mattachine facilities to design and print fliers and mimeographs. Some wondered if Mattachine was deliberately disassociating itself from the young radicals, but soon its oversight would present a problem.
Mark Segal, a 19 year old MAC member, said:
[Mattachine] didn’t like it because we were gaining power. They started giving us a rough time.
Ten days after the Electric Circus forum, Mattachine held the second of two “community meetings” with the young radicals. This July 16 meeting would result in the dissolution of MAC.
Dick Leitsch led the meeting, but his deference to straight society was met with opposition from the radicals.
A 1969 Esquire article recounted the meeting:
With professional aplomb, [Leitsch] reopens the meeting. Police brutality and heterosexual indifference must be protested, he asserts; at the same time, the gay world must retain the favor of the Establishment, especially those who make and change the laws. Homosexual acceptance will come slowly, by educating the straight community, with grace and good humor and…
At this point, Leitsch was interrupted by “a tense boy with leonine hair” who shouted:
We don’t want acceptance, goddammit! We want respect! Demand it! We’re through hiding in dark bars behind Mafia doormen. We’re going to go where the straights go and do anything with each other they do and if they don’t like it, well, fuck them!
As radicals suggested protests in front of cathedrals and boycotts of Bloomingdale’s, Mattachine assistant Madolin Cervantes instead suggested a vigil instead, with candles in a park.
James Fouratt, stood up and said:
Sweet! Bullshit! There’s the stereotype homo again, man! … Bullshit! That’s the role society has been forcing these queens to play, and they just sit and accept it. We have got to radicalize, man! Why? Because as long as we accept getting fired from jobs because we are gay, or not being hired at all, or being treated like second-class citizens, we’re going to remain neurotic and screwed up. … And if it takes riots or even guns to show them what we are, well, that’s the only language the pigs understand!
The radicals cheered. Dick shouted in a desperate attempt to regain order, but was ignored. The first iteration of MAC was done—and a new group was about to emerge.