Document:Stonewall Experiment prologue

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1995

How they had hoped and dreamed; now the sidewalks seemed to smell of blood. — Geoff Mains (Gentle Warriors)

We were standing, Wulf and I, at the intersection of Christopher and West Streets in Greenwich Village, on a chilly Thursday night in the autumn of 1987. The corner was deserted, and in the gusts of cool wind it seemed desolate and forsaken. Anticipating a nostalgic journey into the past, I had been confronted with the devastating reality of the present.

When I lived in New York, a decade earlier, the corner outside Badlands bar would have been alive with gay men, strolling, cruising, socializing, enjoying the one small area of that enormous city where we could talk with friends or pop in to buy an ice-cream or chat with a storekeeper without having to hide our gay souls, our gay feelings. Here we could be seen and known, appreciated or judged, for who we were, rather than for what we were not. That alone, that quite ordinary, and newly minted, honesty that elsewhere we were denied in peril of our lives, made Christopher Street (in spite of the smog) a breath of fresh air.

Wulf and I found a different Christopher Street in 1987. It was almost deserted. Some of the old businesses were gone, others that in the old days were always open late were now shut. Ty's, one of the few gay-owned bars, was open, doing a modest trade. But, on that particular evening, the few people on the street seemed disoriented, one or two of them muttering to themselves, self-involved and distracted. A chill breeze added to the eerie effect. We crossed Hudson Street and walked towards the river. In the old days, at the end of Christopher Street, outside Badlands, was crowded. Especially late in the week, gay men would there in groups or couples or singly, hanging out, out the talent, or just taking the air. There would be an feeling. A good feeling. Now, the corner was empty. Not a soul remained.

For gay men in New York City, the height of the Fear came at about that time, the years 1985-7. For several years, thousands of us been dying – some quickly, some painfully slowly – of a frightening, mysterious and pitiless complex of diseases. The death toll continued to mount, with no abatement in sight. Everyone wondered whether it would strike him next. As one gay activist put it, "We're all living in terror now."

In olden days when plague swept through a city, you could smell it on the wind. And indeed, if anyone today could approach New York fresh from some medieval forest, he would certainly cough, his throat would constrict, his eyes water and his nostrils detect a certain burnt, sulphurous quality he would immediately recognize as a whiff of the Devil. But we have become accustomed to this atmosphere: it is merely the atmosphere of the modern world, the very air we breathe. It goes unnoticed, and we proceed unaware.

My own first day in Manhattan was hot and sunny, one summer in the heady, idealistic early years of gay liberation, the early 1970s. The next night, I followed my intuition through unfamiliar SoHo streets to the old Firehouse, headquarters of the Gay Activists Alliance, where I joined the celebration in progress – hundreds of dancing men and women. And I found a boyfriend, the only man who wasn't dancing and the last to leave – the coatcheck attendant. Where are you now, Craig Kennedy? Alive and well I hope.

For several years running I stayed in New York for long periods, living first with Craig, then with other friends. I went to the conventions of gay writers and scholars at Columbia University and NYU (which had such high energy and good spirits they seemed as much like festivals as conferences). And from 1975 to 1980 I lived in Manhattan, shuttling back and forth from my apartment on Cleveland Place to the gay publishing house I ran from my parents' basement in the suburbs of Toronto.

Jamie Perry worked at the Anvil in those days, the notoriously raunchy gay bar located in an old, wedge-shaped building in the West Village near the river. For a seventeen-year-old runaway from Connecticut with a ninth-grade education, no matter how bright or how white, the city did not hold much prospect of employment. It came down to the Anvil or the streets. So, after a stint on the streets, Jamie tended bar or minded the door, ran the projector for the porno movies in the basement, and did three shows a night with the other dancers, strippers and drag artists. Jamie's speciality was lively dance impersonations of the popular stars of the day – Rod Stewart, Debbie Harry, Elton John.

In a program that usually included Mr. Ruby Rims (female impersonator), Rafael and Eddie (young Puerto Rican strippers) and Yuba (a very tall, very black man with a unique fire act), Jamie stood out as a blond figure of joyous, knowing innocence. His hours were long, his pay was poor, the place was what is known in the business as "a toilet" (though the dressing rooms were conspicuously without one). The working conditions were the pits and the management, it was assumed, were lower-echelon Mafia. It was a job. Jamie made a lot of money for the owners of the Anvil.

The Big Apple in the 1970s, any Friday night: the Anvil full of gay men, sweatily packed together dancing, buying drinks, snorting poppers, having fun, a large percentage of them "ripped to the tits", for there were a great many drugs at the Anvil. In the cellar the flickering light of the projector (for this was B.V. – Before Video) illuminated dark puddles on the stone floor, and there were black rooms and cubby-holes for sex with improper strangers. The windows were sealed, the party timeless, human voices barely audible over the disco throb.

Jamie's first night on the job was his birthday. Next morning, when the crowd dispersed, a young black man was found lying on the wet cellar floor with a knife in his back.

I am not an especially superstitious person. But it did occur to me that if this was an omen, it could scarcely be a worse one. From then on, for as long as the two of us lived in New York, I had an ominous feeling of impending danger that would float into my consciousness and subside again, but that was always lurking somewhere in the back of my mind. The feeling attached itself to Jamie. Late at night and in the mornings as I waited for him to walk home across town through Union Square to our apartment on Cleveland Place, I sometimes experienced a tightening anxiety which occasionally bordered on panic. When Jamie was late, or was mugged, or the time he blacked out on the street, I imagined our leaving New York. I had enjoyed being "down there on a visit", but the world was waiting for Jamie and it was time he took a look at it.

It also became clear that Jamie's health was deteriorating. As I had no Green Card, I could not legally work. When a big enough cheque came – payment for a writing project – we left the gay ghetto for England's green and pleasant land, convalescence, and a view of horizons beyond that larger ghetto, Manhattan. As soon as we were on the plane, I felt an uncanny sense of relief. Born in London (during an air raid late in the war), now I was going home. And bringing someone with me.

Seven years later, on a Thursday night in 1987, I thought to take Wulf, my lover and partner of (then) four years, to see the old haunts, especially Christopher Street, where the Stonewall riots had so surprised everyone eighteen years before. As we passed the street sign at the corner of Christopher and Gay Streets I thought of Wallace, my old friend and mentor, who had died in a tumble downstairs the year I met Wulf. The sign had adorned the dustjacket of his first book, Christopher and Gay, a vivid, loving picture of the scene in the years just after Stonewall.

A few blocks later, we came to that deserted corner, and all the gay sounds of the past diminished into an eerie quiet, with only a cool breeze and the sounds of a few nearby cars to break the silence. I thought New York had never seemed so silent. We turned the corner, and walked the few steps to the Ramrod, the leather bar I sometimes used to go to. As we walked up to the storefront, I was shocked to see it closed and boarded up with unpainted planks, as though nailed into some flimsy coffin and abandoned. Wulf and I were the only people on the street. Only Wulf's presence, walking as usual a little ahead of me, kept me from drifting off into a world of memories and ghosts.

That was the moment I felt the full impact of AIDS. Of course, I had lost friends, and friends of friends. I had begun a quest to understand what had happened. But I had to come upon that desolate corner, with its boarded-up bar, to feel in my gut for the first time the terrible magnitude of our loss. So many thousands of gay men, and others, had been taken away since the 1980s began, and many more would follow. My poet's mind, I suppose, needed to fix on an image, and I was given the image of an empty street.

It seemed far from the optimistic days of the early 1970s, when the gay movement had brought us a sense of freedom and hope. The natural affection and erotic feelings of man for man and woman for woman have been stifled for so long that all our human relationships have suffered for it. Civilization threatens to become more and more an emotional wasteland as the links between parent and child, husband and wife, friend and friend, deteriorate. But all the while, the incidence of overtly homosexual people has quietly increased. As one gay thinker remarked, "at the turn of the century the estimate of one homosexual man in 200 was seen as amazingly high. Fifty years later, Kinsey concluded that one man in twenty was what we would term gay. After only ten years of the modern gay liberation movement, this figure again seems far too low." (1)

But society is slow to adapt, and prejudice is much harder to kill than people. The new priesthood of science adapted the old priesthood's stigma on homosexuality, merely changing the terminology. Homosexuality was no longer seen as sin but as a symptom of sickness. Modern medicine forgets that symptoms are signs of self-healing. It scarcely occurred to anyone that homosexuals might be a healing force, and that to suppress us might have unforseen "side-effects".

Of course, some of us, in those early years, realized that our liberation might not last. As a New York journalist had said of an earlier period in the city's history, "It was one of those heedless, luxury-glutted times that usually happens before a disaster." But no one guessed what form a new disaster might take. An earlier attempt at emergence, in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, had been aborted, the homosexual emancipation movement crushed thousands of its followers stigmatized with pink triangles in the concentration camps. But the war against Nazism brought hope, and, as it happened, sowed the seeds of what was to become the homophile movement. After the riot at the Stonewall Inn in the early morning of 28 June 1969, during the last days of 1960s "Flower Power", those seeds began to blossom. Yet by as early as 1973, many of the early, idealistic gay libbers had become disillusioned (2). What followed was the time that Michel Foucault described as evolving "a whole new art of sexual practice" that would turn the ghettos into "laboratories of sexual experiment". (3)

Preliminary experimental results began to appear on 5 June 1981, when the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published case studies of five homosexual men who had contracted a rare form of pneumonia and a number of other "opportunistic infections". The decade of gay lib was over. The AIDies had begun.

Notes

© 1995 by Ian Young

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