Читать книгу Spine Intact, Some Creases - Victor J. Banis - Страница 13

CHAPTER FIVE

THAT WAS NO LADY…

Drag is forever. Histories of Gold Rush California tell of saloons in which some male patrons donned aprons and assorted finery and danced as the female partner with the other men. But drag goes back much further than that. The early Greeks had young men who wore the make up and garb of women and worked as hetaerae, or “professional ladies.” Early Native American tribes had their berdaches, men who dressed and lived as women; of course they had no bars in which to hang out, but I’m sure they enlivened those evenings around the campfires.

In the fifties there were world-famous drag bars such as Finocchio’s in San Francisco, which had started as a speakeasy in the twenties and evolved into a show bar by the forties. Most of these bars, though, were more often tourist-oriented than truly gay bars. This is an example of the sort of psychology common to most comics—if they are going to laugh at you anyway, try to get them to pay for the privilege.

Let me tell you something else while I’m at it—many of those “straight” men in the audience who were laughing so heartily were getting plenty turned on. There are many, and I do mean many, men who would not dream of fooling around with a “queer” who have no reluctance in playing with a drag queen, even though they know without any doubt that the woman is a man. We all have ways of fooling ourselves, don’t we?

Now, I am not one of those gays who believe, as many seem to do, that all men are gay at heart. So far as I can figure out, the only thing that all men are is male. I do believe, however, and my entire experience has borne this out, that many, many more men than the statistics would indicate have been willing at one time or another to experiment. This would jibe with Kinsey’s sexual preference scale, which put absolute heterosexuals—a small percentage—at one end, and absolute homosexuals—ditto—at the other. The fact is, most men are really somewhere in the middle. They are just inclined to lie about it when asked by pollsters.

And not only to pollsters. I have had one-on-one conversations with many heterosexual men who talked frankly to me about homosexual inklings they had discerned in themselves—perhaps nothing more than a secret pleasure they took in being cruised by a gay man, or sometimes realizing that they thought another man was attractive, though not so much so that they would ever have acted upon it. More than once I have subsequently heard the same men vehemently deny to buddies, wives and girlfriends, that they could ever possibly have experienced such feelings. It is an area in which many men feel threatened.

Nevertheless the old expression remains true, a stiff willie has no conscience (yes, yes, that’s not the way I heard it either, but your mother might read this); and it can safely be amended to add, not much discrimination either. Especially in the dark.

There is a story told of Voltaire. He and a friend expressed their curiosity regarding sodomy and decided, in the interests of philosophy and solely as an experiment, to give it a try together. Afterward, they agreed that neither of them had enjoyed the experience.

Some years later the friend wrote Voltaire to tell him that he had performed the experiment a second time and found it no more enjoyable than the first. Voltaire’s swift reply was, “Once, a philosopher, twice, a sodomite.”

In a like vein, Ted Morgan, in his biography of Somerset Maugham, tells of a chat between Maugham and Winston Churchill in which Sir Winston confessed to trying it once with a man just to see what it was like.

I am inclined to think that most men, at the right time (read, when really horny), with the right companion (whom they are confident will be discreet), under the right circumstances (a cocktail or two can do much to loosen inhibitions), are agreeable to a little philosophy, if only just a little.

I should probably add, however, before my straight male friends start running for the hills, that at this stage in my life I am very much hors de combat. Here is an item for those of you who used to thrill to The Shadow on radio or in comics. This is the secret of invisibility; get older and go to a gay bar. At least I am more fortunate than many others in this respect because I am entirely comfortable with my own company. To be honest, I mostly prefer it. And that is fortunate for a gay man of my years. It is as well to be at ease with the inevitable.

* * * *

The laws regarding drag were often muddled to the point of inanity. In Los Angeles, even in the fifties, it was not illegal for a man to wear women’s clothes—else they would have had to arrest Milton Berle, Ray Bolger, Jack Benny, and countless other entertainers in a long tradition of movie and TV cross-dressers ranging to today’s Tom Hanks.

The litmus test was whether the individual was wearing men’s underwear. You could be ordered at any time to “hoist those skirts and show those skivvies.” If you had on your boxers you got the USDA stamp of approval. Panties got you a set in the slammer and very mixed doubles.

As an aside, I suppose it is worth mentioning that over the years I have run across quite a few entirely straight men who liked to wear women’s panties. I’m not going to try to explain this. I am only reporting it.

In general the authorities looked the other way when it came to performers in drag in nightclubs, but in most of those instances protection money was being paid. The Jewel Box Revue toured the South and New Orleans had its “feathers and finery.” Regardless of the city, however, you wore drag in public at your own peril.

Jay Little’s 1956 novel, Somewhere Between the Two, probably ought to be required reading for any drag queen, if you can find it—it is long out of print, but copies can often be found in used bookstores. Despite the period setting it is still the most realistic and sympathetic portrayal I have ever read of the world of the professional drag performer.

One thing Little does make clear as well is a fact not always known to those outside of that world—that many, maybe most, female impersonators are straight. Cross-dressing isn’t a question of sexual orientation. It has been said that the late Aristotle Onassis, beloved of Jackie and Maria, liked to dress up on his yacht, Skorpios. I can’t imagine it was a pretty sight, but so long as it made him feel pretty, who’s to complain. Bear in mind, his sailors were Greek.

Infamous FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his partner, Clyde Tolson, were said to like dressing up. And according to Esther Williams, fifties he-man movie star Jeff Chandler had an entire dressing room full of dresses and wigs. Her only real complaint is that he was too big for the polka dots he apparently favored.

My point is; this certainly had nothing to do with his being “that way.” I recently chatted with a young straight man, a lawyer, who shyly and only after long conversation confessed that he liked to dress as a woman and thought he looked pretty good, too. Apparently, this had been worrying him. He was enormously relieved when I assured him that this did not mean that he had a queer streak in him. Which was unfortunate from my point of view. He was awfully cute.

Some of the drag queens of the past assumed the status of legends for those of us living under the cloak. T. C. Jones (straight, I’m told) played legitimate clubs in New York and even did parts in straight plays, almost unheard of then. I saw him only once towards the end of his career but he was a wonderful entertainer. The highlight of his act was a pantomime done to “Ten Cents a Dance,” in which he played the part of an over-the-hill taxi dancer spurned by customers looking for younger and prettier partners. Funny, and poignant.

Rae Bourbon was a gay version of Belle Barth, a practitioner of a type of bawdy humor that faded after the sexual revolution. Moms Mabley and Rusty Warren (“all right, ladies, get those knockers up”) had similar acts.

Rusty was younger than the others but mostly these were older women of one minority or another. They say all humor is based on pain. The foul-mouthed humor seemed all the funnier coming from a little old lady. It was funnier, too, because this sort of talk was forbidden, taboo, definitely no-no. Women weren’t supposed to talk about sex in those days—weren’t, in fact, supposed to know about sex—let alone tell dirty jokes in nightclubs. You didn’t hear those words or subjects on radio or television, or even stage shows. And maybe these ladies got away with it in part because the cops were reluctant to drag a grandmotherly looking old lady out of a club in handcuffs, though that wouldn’t have, and almost certainly didn’t, help the drag queens.

With the sexual revolution the barriers began to fall, and where they were slow to fall they were kicked over by people like Lenny Bruce. No longer verboten, the jokes seemed less funny and many of these careers faded and died. Madame, of Waylon & Madame (who started at The Academy in Los Angeles), was perhaps the last in this line of comics. With her pearls and feathered boas, Madame was a dressed up version of the working class bawd, a puppet Rae Bourbon.

Bourbon’s records could sometimes be found under the counter in the fifties, if you knew someone. The best known of these LPs was An Evening in Copenhagen, which featured such numbers as “The Stipend Must Rally Round Here,” and “Sisters of Charity” (“And don’t be stingy, give it all, what do you care what you are called, be a sister of charity”) and “The Wedding,” a long and hilarious account of a far underground gay wedding in San Francisco; “The one who was performing the ceremony—oh, he looked so lovely, you couldn’t tell who was the bride with him standing there—he looked down at the two who were getting married and said, Do you…? And before they could deny it, the law came in.…” The comedy is raw, but for its type it stands up pretty well today, though the differences in the gay culture over the intervening years are immediately apparent.

I was part of a sad postscript, by the way, to the Rae Bourbon story. In the seventies Earl Kemp, my editor at Greenleaf Classics, called me to ask if I had ever heard of Rae Bourbon, and when I said that I certainly had, he wanted to know if I thought there were enough fans to make a success of an autobiography. He had gotten a manuscript, badly written, and wondered if it was worth the time and trouble it would take to make it publishable.

I had to say in all honesty that I doubted there was much of a market for such a book. Bourbon’s heyday had been twenty years earlier—he was already old when I saw him in Washington, D.C., in the mid-fifties, and indeed I had heard nothing of him for a decade or more. Earl passed on the book and it wasn’t until later that I learned that Rae Bourbon at that time had been in jail in a small Texas town charged with murder, and was trying to raise money for his defense.

The circumstances of the murder were as bizarre as any of the stories he told in his nightclub act. It seems he had been touring in an old van with his “children,” an entire pack of dogs (I have heard estimates ranging from seven or eight up to fourteen of them) and playing gigs where he could find them. The van broke down and he boarded the dogs with a local vet. Time passed. The dogs were old and many of them ill. Convinced that Bourbon was never coming back to claim them, the vet eventually put the dogs to sleep.

Bourbon did return, however, and was so enraged at what he regarded as the murder of his “children” that he attacked the vet and beat him so severely that the man died from his injuries. Bourbon was arrested for murder.

Eventually Rae Bourbon died in his Texas jail before his case could be resolved. Would it have made any difference if I had advised differently regarding his manuscript? Maybe not, but it’s one of those things I’ve always wished I could go back and do differently. That’s not to say I condone what he did, but any gay who grew up before the sixties can understand it.

Whip a dog often enough and he will learn to bite.

* * * *

I have to say, though, that there was a world of difference between these drag queen legends of the past and most of today’s performers. For one thing, too many contemporary performers feel that performing means that they need only lip-synch to a record and twirl about in yards of tulle. Each of the “old girls” developed her own character, often brilliantly realized. Most of them spoke and sang with their own voices, but often they trained and practiced for long hours to develop a voice convincingly female, not quite falsetto and not their usual masculine voice either. A third voice, as one performer once described it to me. How many drag queens today are willing to invest the time and effort to develop that third voice?

They had stage routines, usually with lots of funny patter, and many of them were very good at song and dance. All of which is to say, they were true entertainers who just happened to be wearing wigs and dresses.

Of course, there have been some very talented drag queens in recent years. Divine was special—his drag persona was certainly unlike any other.

Barry Humphries (so far as I know, straight) has created a readily identifiable character in Dame Edna Everage. This is far beyond just dressing up and he is as popular with straight audiences as with gay.

And I don’t want to sound either like I’m set against lip-synching, per se. If you are creative, if you have talent, you can make an asset of almost anything. Lypsinka has taken that all-too-common lip-synching to hysterical extremes, lip-synching not only song lyrics but dialogue as well, an entire show patched together from what must be a hundred different sources. For the record, by the way, his frantic stage persona is a far cry from his own quiet, laid back personality as John Epperson.

Charles Pierce, though his stand up routines were in his own voice (or one of several of his voices) lip-synched parts of his routines too, to wonderful effect. Anyone who saw him at the old Gilded Cage, soaring over the heads of the patrons on a flowered swing while tootling Jeanette’s recording of “San Francisco,” is not likely to forget the experience.

* * * *

I suppose it is the fantasy of all cross dressers to be truly mistaken for the real thing. Drag queens tell me that the highest compliment they can be paid is for someone to say “I thought you were a real woman.” Drag is all about illusion, naturally, and on the stage it often works. D.L.E., as we used to say—distance lends enchantment. One even hears about impersonators functioning as women in the world outside the theater, but I’ve seen scant evidence of that.

Oddly, there have been a couple of famous instances of women living successfully as men, the most famous being that of Teena Brandon, whose story is told convincingly in Kimberly Peirce’s movie Boys Don’t Cry (1999). What for many people makes this story even more astonishing is that, far from avoiding the super-macho young men of the town, the ones who might have been perceived as the biggest threat to her, Brandon actually hung out with the toughest of them.

I myself don’t find that quite so surprising. As an effeminate young man who was always at risk of violence at the hands of straights, I very early on adopted a policy of setting out to woo the toughest of the toughs. If I came into a room, a bar, a party full of straights, I made it a habit to look around and find the meanest looking son of a bitch in the place and I made a bee line for him. I knew that if I could win him over the rest would be cream puffs. And if I was going to get the shit beat out of me, I might as well get it over with up front.

Most of the time my strategy worked and you would be astonished how many of those mean sons of bitches went on to become good friends, even after they knew the truth about me (or maybe some of them knew all along and just wanted to be wooed; men are funny that way).

Tragically Brandon’s ploy ultimately failed; it was two of those tough guy pals who, when they learned the truth, raped and eventually killed her—in large part, it seems, from anger that she had so successfully fooled them.

Why does it seem to be easier for a woman to create the illusion of being a man than vice versa? I think in part that may be because those women who have dressed and lived as men have often been content to assume an androgynous sort of masculinity rather than the super macho sort. It is not so much a matter of playing an effeminate man as a slick one.

The man’s world, after all, is filled with a wide range of “types.” Look at the men who have been movie superstars. Though both Ronald Coleman and David Niven are perceived as being heterosexual there is a great chasm between their sort of masculinity and, say, Bruce Willis’ or Steve McQueen’s. Even James Dean had an androgynous quality about him, which indeed was why he could appeal so powerfully to both men and women.

On the other hand, men dressing as women rarely try to appear as tom-boyish women, which would seem an easier act to pull off, but go for the ultra, the exaggeratedly feminine, which is harder to do successfully (older performers, such as Rae Bourbon, often go for the harridan look, which in fact is easier to make convincing). My friend John Beard performed regularly as Johnnie Adonis in the taverns in small Midwestern towns and cities such as Greenville, Ohio. I can attest that the farmers and working class patrons loved his act, as I did myself, but I hardly think it was because they thought he was really a woman.

Of course it is sort of like murder, isn’t it? You hear about the ones that don’t work, but if it did work, you”d never know, would you? Years ago, there was a dancer named Brandy, petite and very pretty, who appeared regularly at the Queen Mary, a drag club in the San Fernando Valley. I saw Brandy a number of times on and off stage—occasionally in brightly lighted coffee shops after the shows, where the truth is often sadly obvious; but I never could be sure about Brandy until I saw her being interviewed on television and learned that she was indeed a he who did live undetected in drag. He was the only one that I ever personally met, however, who was that convincing.

Now I suppose some of you are thinking, don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. I confess, I am very nearly a virgin when it comes to drag. I say very nearly, because I did indeed dress up one time, and that is the only other experience I have had with someone off the performing stage who was able utterly to fool the public—at least, some of the public. At least for a brief while.

I didn’t call it or think of what I did as “drag.” To be honest I doubt if I had even heard that term at the time, when I was fourteen or perhaps fifteen. It was Halloween and I was just “dressing up.” We had no money for Halloween costumes, but with so many sisters there was no shortage of dresses.

I bought a little black half mask and a blonde wig at the local Woolworth’s for twenty-nine cents, or perhaps it was fifty-nine. I ask you, how convincing could it have been? My sisters helped me with a bra, stuffed but not over done. Everything in good taste. A bit of makeup, some nail polish, a drop or two of Oh Dick Alone, and I was ready to set out in my smart pumps (I never have understood how real drag queens, or real women for that matter, can walk in high heels!)

My brother-in-law’s brother had a new convertible, black and plenty snazzy, and he gave me a lift to the local armory, where the town’s Halloween festivities were taking place. I started up the stairs—and ran into a covey of the school macho contingent.

I was not really popular with these guys to begin with, certainly not with Morris, as I shall name him here, who was the biggest, the loudest, the most fearsome of the bunch. Morris was the school bully. It was his role in life, it seemed, to make everyone else’s life miserable, and he dedicated himself to his task. I was his favorite target, and the way in which I earned that privilege was a strange one.

I was twelve or perhaps not quite that when Morris moved to our community and started in school, in my grade though he was perhaps a year older than I. A significant year older, as it turned out.

From the start Morris was friendly with me. Downright chummy in fact. I might have suspected something but I did not. You may titter if you like but I was still quite innocent. We lived not far from one another, as country boys calculate things and I was flattered when he invited me to his home one afternoon for his birthday party.

I was not even suspicious to discover that I was the only guest, though I suppose by then I should have been. His mother served us cake and ice cream and when he suggested we go for a hike in the nearby woods I skipped along merrily at his side. Picture Little Red Riding Hood traipsing into the woods with the Wolf, though in fact in this instance it was the Wolf who had the basket (I didn’t say absolutely innocent, mind you).

We soon found ourselves in the privacy of a secluded glade, a scene quite out of one of those romantic paintings from the eighteenth century. Now, I know some of you who know me will find this difficult to imagine, but when he proposed that we “do it,” I did not at first understand what “it” was. When he pulled a woodie out of his jeans, however, and started to massage it, I did finally begin to get the picture.

A picture which so startled me that I could only decline mutely. I don’t think I had yet discovered “it” as a private matter. It had certainly never occurred to me as a joint project. I was accustomed to spending time in the woods—I was a country boy, as I have explained. However, this was a far cry from Cowboys and Indians, or at any rate a variation on that theme that I had never before encountered.

My disinclination was the end of our growing friendship. I left and was not invited back. It never occurred to me afterward to tell anyone else about his propositioning me. It was not the sort of thing I supposed one brought up in polite conversation. I think, though, that he was afraid I might, and that when he was so nasty to me day in and day out over the next several years, it was a form of “self-protection,” or distancing himself from me in case I had told anyone and they might be inclined to believe me.

When I celebrated finishing high school, I was celebrating as much as anything the fact that I would henceforth be free of Morris and his antics.

A few years later I was home for a visit and an old friend called to say there was someone who would love to see me. When I arrived at his apartment that evening, who should be there but Morris. I was astonished to think that he had asked to see me and even more astonished by his friendly, his downright warm manner.

Right up until he followed me into the bathroom. By this time of course I was all grown up. I now knew, as I had not before, what “jism” meant, and I was quick to get the point when he yanked down his trousers in an effort once again to convince me to play.

And I must admit his argument was persuasive. The Wolf’s basket had been filled with goodies after all, as it turned out. Alas, the level of conversation hadn’t improved much; “take a look at this, why dontcha?” I swear it, if I had shown him two detailed photographs and asked him to identify them, he almost certainly would have been unable to say which one was the hole in the ground.

Of course it wasn’t this time, nor had it ever been, intellectual excitement that Morris was offering to share with me. I should perhaps add too that with the passing of a few years and the loss of some baby fat, Morris had grown into a rather good looking man, in a sort of King Kong way. Well, those brutes can be exciting, can’t they?

But wait, hadn’t we played this scene already? Moreover there was a principle involved. This man had made my life miserable for years and I was not about at this late date to reward his misbehavior with, well, rewards. I excused myself, I bade my host good evening, and departed.

I never saw Morris again and in a sense our entire relationship was book-ended by those two propositions, so entirely different from everything in between. His life was not a pretty one. He was later wounded in a robbery attempt and he died young in a bizarre drug incident.

Was it my refusal to play that sent him down the tragic path he followed? He had seemed a nice enough young man up until that fateful day in the forest. Could my love have saved him from himself? Might one kiss—well, I don’t really think it was kisses he was after on either of those occasions but all right then, might one blow job have made the difference?

Hmmm. Probably not. In any event, he was very much alive on this Halloween evening and obviously as smitten by my girlish charms as he had been before by my boyish charms—was there some bodily chemical I secreted? If only I had been able to discover it and use it at will. I can think of scores of times with others when I would have liked to be so irresistible.

This, however, was not one of them. Morris was not alone either. There were three or perhaps four others in his group, including Mister Touchdown, our dazzlingly handsome football hero.

Now, though he was never the sort of bully that Morris was, Mister Touchdown clearly had never had any use for me. This is not to say that he was entirely innocent of experimentation—I knew from conversations I had overheard in the locker room between him and some of his friends that he had at least once gone to visit a retired politico who lived in our town and was fond of paying the local boys for their time. (Morris was known to visit him as well, which I guess you could say qualified him as a “Pro-Magnon” creature.) I once heard Mister Touchdown boasting that he was bigger—“when I’m hard”—than a classmate who was famed for his endowment; which certainly indicated to me that he had seen our classmate hard and I could only wonder when and how.

But these were paying politicians and the recognized class standard for size and I was not in either party. I truly doubt that Mister Touchdown would have deigned to pee on me had I been on fire.

Which makes it puzzling that many, many years later I found myself sitting at a table next to Mister Touchdown, only to have him start to play “kneesies” with me under the table. What fun—except that our dazzlingly handsome hero was now older. Lots older. The years during which I had “laughed at time and defied the years” (I just know you will remember the source of that remark) had not been kind to him. Fat, flabby, balding, he was not likely to arouse passion in my heart. “Where were you,” I wanted to cry out, “All those lonely nights when I could have used you?” There had surely been in those years plenty of fires that he might have put out had he been of a mind. At this stage I had my doubts about the condition of his hose.

I should perhaps say that, if this experience were mine alone, I would not have included it here—face it, with the exception of a few of my old classmates, who would know the man in question or care?

But it is a classic, isn’t it? Haven’t we all, when we were young, wanted some classmate’s love, friendship—oh, hell, his body in the back seat of a car—and been spurned, often cruelly; only to have the self-same come back years later, when we are taller, heavier, thinner, blonder, pimple free, dripping with poise or money—which is to say, when “who-needs-you”? And aren’t they always astonished that we no longer want them?

Of course, gays often think this is their story alone but, sorry kids, it happens to straight boys and girls too. It’s what Tchaikovsky’s opera, Eugene Onegin, is all about, if you didn’t know, which has a near perfect ‘serves you right” ending. It is surprising, is it not, how often we share the same stories in our lives and yet how seldom we recognize ourselves in one another? It remains for the artist—the painter, the story teller, the composer—to help us understand our kinship.

On this Halloween night, however, Mister Touchdown was still entirely desirable, at least under other circumstances, still young and handsome—and all too frighteningly macho. I tried to slip by this little group unnoticed but apparently my sisters and I had done a better job of dressing me up than I had realized. The boys all thought I looked plenty desirable and proceeded to flirt with me, if you could call it that. It was along the lines of “Hey, Baby, have I got something for you!” The cool, sophisticated approach in other words.

Needless to say I did not reply. They might not recognize my shapely legs from gym class but there was surely a risk that they might recognize my voice and I felt certain they would not be happy knowing that it was I with whom they had been flirting so outrageously. At the very least I was, in the then current vernacular, “cruisin” for a bruisin’.”

The problem was, the more I tried to avoid these boys, the more excited they became. It was like playing hard to get. It only fanned the flames.

As it happened I had the means at hand to put out the flames. By this time I was fairly wetting my pants. And I didn’t dare go to the john. Which one would I have gone to? The men’s, giving the secret away? The women’s, where I might be recognized as an imposter (who knew, at fourteen, what mysterious rituals went on in those places anyway?)

With each passing moment my situation seemed to me to grow more perilous. The more ardently they pursued me, the angrier I realized they would be if they discovered the truth. In their minds I had no doubt they would look upon it all as a case of a queer trying to come on to them, never mind that I was wracking my brains for an escape plan.

I finally ended up slipping outside. My intentions were twofold—relieve my bladder and get away from my admirers.

Alas, it was not to be so easy. Someone raised the cry and the chase was on—literally. In my panic I no doubt only worsened the situation. I hiked up my skirt and ran, galomphing over lawns and about houses, leaping fences in a single bound, spilling trash cans and in a twinkling pursued by the neighborhood dogs as well as my erstwhile Romeos. I felt that I was running for my life—I had no doubt they would kill me if they caught me.

I was fast. I was used to making tracks. Indeed, if we had had track when I was going through high school, I might have been one of the jocks. I knew from lots of experiences that none of them could catch me. I had had plenty of practice outrunning some of these guys.

This was different, however; I was in a dress and pumps for one thing. I even worried about the weight of the stuffing in the bra. Anyway, I was a short distance runner, not a long distance one, and I was tiring. It was only the adrenaline of terror that kept me out in front for so long but I knew from the hue and cry behind me—and the barking of the hounds from hell—that they were gaining. I now knew exactly how much fun the fox could have at a hunt.

“Lord,” I prayed, “Get me out of this and I swear I will never again put on a dress.”

I rounded a corner, by now nearly back at the armory where I had begun—and there, in shining armor—well, a black Chevrolet convertible actually—was my earlier escort. I leaped into the car and we were off, before the hounds came into view.

A tawdry little story and I tell it neither to amuse nor enlighten but only to make a point—that when I speak of drag, of its successes and its failures, I speak from a perspective of some experience. I have been there. I have run in those pumps.

There is a postscript to this tale, too. At school the following Monday I heard tales of a mysterious beauty, reportedly from one of the towns down the road, who had appeared at the Halloween festivities on Saturday night and who, like Cinderella, had inflamed the passions of all the young men present before disappearing, leaving behind no glass slipper but a bevy of disappointed suitors.

I never revealed her identity. And I never again put on a dress. A promise is a promise.

* * * *

The reality is, drag queens have always been on the front lines. A gay in civilian garb, even an effeminate gay, had some chance of passing. You could, as Quentin Crisp recommended in The Naked Civil Servant (1968), simply try walking faster; “It might help.”

It was ironic that if a man was wearing a dress he was automatically going to be taken for queer even though in fact he quite often, perhaps most often, might not be. And the ones who are gay are usually, in my experience, tops—I suppose a corollary to all those macho macho marines with helium in their heels, so beloved of many gays.

I would be surprised to learn that there were very many, if any, drag queens in the fifties and sixties who hadn’t been the target of physical violence, and the situation is not greatly improved today. Through the years drag queens have earned a reputation for being tough. They have to be.

Which explains in part why it was largely drag queens who stirred up that hornet’s nest at Stonewall.

Greenwich Village in New York had always been one of those places favored by gays, though it would probably have been an exaggeration to describe it in the sixties as a gay mecca. It was a place where alternative lifestyles were, if not embraced, generally tolerated. Uptown, there were bars and restaurants and certainly apartment buildings where gays were pointedly not welcome, but no one bothered much in the Village and there had always been a few hangouts.

One of the oldest was the Stonewall Inn on Sheridan Square, where Seventh Avenue intersected Christopher Street. The bar had been around for years and though its decor was decidedly tacky and you didn’t want to look too closely at the bar glasses, it was nonetheless probably the most popular spot in town, packed to the rafters most nights with an assortment of drag queens, leather boys, lesbians (both butch and lipstick), frat boys and the occasional tourist—bars in those days weren’t as specialized as they would become later. You were so glad to have one you didn’t want to be too particular.

The Stonewall was Mafia run, which meant the owners made pay offs regularly to ensure that the bar was left open by the police. Nevertheless it was necessary that the police made token raids from time to time, to save face. The usual procedure was for the police to provide advance notice to the bar’s proprietors. ID checks were made of all the patrons and one or two ordinary gays might find themselves arrested for public drunkenness or lewd behavior, but it was usually only the drag queens, regarded as the most vulnerable of the helpless, who were detained.

For whatever reason someone failed to give the advance warning that Saturday morning, June 28, 1969, when a modest raiding party—two detectives, two uniformed patrolmen and two policewomen—showed up for a token raid and inadvertently set history in motion.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Judy Garland, the gay icon, had been buried just the day before and emotions were running strong. It was the second raid in just a few days and it was one o”clock in the morning, the very height of madness for those out on the town.

The lights went up, the signal for the male couples on the dance floor to separate. The always resented ID checks began. One by one the customers were released onto the street outside, though as usual the drag queens were held back. On any other night, those outside would probably just have drifted to another bar or headed for home. This time, however, they hung around and a crowd began to form.

At first the atmosphere was festive. Gays can generally be counted on to find the humor in any situation and this was no different. Campy remarks flew back and forth, poses were struck and a few brave souls flirted with the detectives.

When the paddy wagon arrived, however, the mood began to change. There were boos and catcalls while the bartender and the doorman and three drag queens in full regalia were loaded inside. The paddy wagon departed quickly, perhaps the driver sensing that something was afoot. In its wake an ominous silence descended.

The uniformed officers reappeared struggling with a butch lesbian who, in a startling departure from the usual routine, was resisting arrest. When they tried to force her into a police car, the lesbian threw a punch.

This was decidedly not the usual thing to do. According to one reliable source it was Marshall Olds (the only heterosexual member of the legendary performing group, the Cockettes) who threw the first beer bottle. “That’ll radicalize ’em,” he is alleged to have said.

The crowd was indeed radicalized. They began to throw more bottles and coins at the police; even, as it was termed in one newspaper report, “canine feces.” Dog poop to you and me. The officers fled back inside the bar but the crowd pursued them. Someone ignited a fire. Outside the crowd was growing, numbering in the thousands as news of this unheard of resistance spread.

Backup arrived and the terrified police were eventually able to put out the fire and escape but the melée was far from over. The Tactical Patrol Force, who had certainly never before faced, or imagined facing, a crowd of gay rioters, marched up Christopher Street in wedge formation. The retreating crowd continued to pelt them with whatever they could find to throw.

At the Stonewall itself a chorus line of queens kicked their heels and sang, “We are the Stonewall girls. We wear our hair in curls, We wear no underwear, We show our pubic hair.” All right, it’s not Rogers and Hart, but rehearsal time was limited and there was no piano.

The Force broke up the crowd brutally but within hours the entire Village—indeed much of New York City—knew of the raid and its aftermath. By Saturday night a crowd of thousands gathered outside the Stonewall bearing gay placards and chanting a heretofore undreamed of chant; “Gay Power.” The rally lasted through Sunday and into the early hours of Monday morning.

The gay world would never be the same.