Read Online City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s by Edmund White - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Edmund White
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antics of the S.T.A.R. members (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries). Angry lesbians, angrier drag queens, excessive mourning, staggering heat, racial tensions, the examples of civil disobedience set by the women’s movement, the antiwar protesters, the Black Panthers—all the elements were present and only a single flame was needed to ignite the bonfire.
* * *
The Stonewall wasn’t really a disco. It had a jukebox, a good one, and two big, long rooms where you could dance. Bars were open till four in the morning in New York; gay guys would come home from work, eat, go to bed having set the alarm for midnight, and stay out till four. Of course there were no Internet sites, but also no telephone dating lines, no backrooms, and up till then no trucks or wharves open to sex.
There was a lot of street cruising and a lot of bar cruising. We had to have cool pickup lines. We were all thin from amphetamines; my diet doctor was always prescribing “speed” for me, and I’d still be up at six in the morning reading the yellow pages with great and compulsive fascination. We had long, dirty hair and untrimmed sideburns and hip-huggers and funny black boots that zipped up the side and denim cowboy shirts with pearlescent pressure-pop buttons. We had bell-bottoms. We all smoked all the time (I was up to three packs a day). We didn’t have big showboat muscles or lots of attitude. Our shoulders were as narrow as our hips. We didn’t look hale, but we were healthy—this was twelve years before AIDS was first heard of and all we got was the clap. We had that a lot, maybe once a month, since no one but paranoid married men used condoms. I dated my clap doctor, who spent most of his free time copying van Gogh sunflowers.
I would go to the Stonewall and drink three or four vodka tonics to get up the nerve to ask John Stipanela, a high school principal, to dance. I had a huge crush on him but he wasn’t interested in bedding me, though we did become friends. One night there I picked up an ultra-WASP boy working in his family business of import-export, but I found him a bit too passive—until I discovered he was the guy my office-mate at work was obsessively in love with and had been mooning over for months. I felt bad about cock-blocking my office-mate (“bird-dogging,” as we said then) and sort of impressedwith myself that I’d scored where he, a much better looking man, had failed.
Then there was the raid, the whimper heard round the world, the fall of our gay Bastille. On June 28, 1969, the bar was raided, and for the first time gays resisted. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms staged the raid, since they’d discovered the liquor bottles in the bar were bootlegged and that the local police precinct was in cahoots with the Mafia owners. As the patrons and workers were being led out of the bar and pushed into a paddy wagon, the angry crowd that had gathered outside began to boo. Then some of the queens inside the van began to fight back—and a few escaped. The crowd was energized by the violence.
Everyone was so pissed off over that particular police raid because once the World’s Fair was over, the cops seemed to forget about us and lots of new bars had opened. There were raids, but only once a month and usually early in the evening, so as not to spoil the later, serious hours of cruising and dancing and flirting and drinking. Now we had a new, handsome mayor, John Lindsay. But he only looked better. He was in constant conflict with the unions, with antiwar protesters, with student radicals who took over Columbia—and with the gay community.
Before the Stonewall uprising there hadn’t really been much of a gay community, just guys cruising Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street. But when the police raided Stonewall and gay men feared their bars were going to be closed once again, all hell broke loose. I was there, just by chance, and I remember thinking it would be the first funny revolution. We were
* * *
The Stonewall wasn’t really a disco. It had a jukebox, a good one, and two big, long rooms where you could dance. Bars were open till four in the morning in New York; gay guys would come home from work, eat, go to bed having set the alarm for midnight, and stay out till four. Of course there were no Internet sites, but also no telephone dating lines, no backrooms, and up till then no trucks or wharves open to sex.
There was a lot of street cruising and a lot of bar cruising. We had to have cool pickup lines. We were all thin from amphetamines; my diet doctor was always prescribing “speed” for me, and I’d still be up at six in the morning reading the yellow pages with great and compulsive fascination. We had long, dirty hair and untrimmed sideburns and hip-huggers and funny black boots that zipped up the side and denim cowboy shirts with pearlescent pressure-pop buttons. We had bell-bottoms. We all smoked all the time (I was up to three packs a day). We didn’t have big showboat muscles or lots of attitude. Our shoulders were as narrow as our hips. We didn’t look hale, but we were healthy—this was twelve years before AIDS was first heard of and all we got was the clap. We had that a lot, maybe once a month, since no one but paranoid married men used condoms. I dated my clap doctor, who spent most of his free time copying van Gogh sunflowers.
I would go to the Stonewall and drink three or four vodka tonics to get up the nerve to ask John Stipanela, a high school principal, to dance. I had a huge crush on him but he wasn’t interested in bedding me, though we did become friends. One night there I picked up an ultra-WASP boy working in his family business of import-export, but I found him a bit too passive—until I discovered he was the guy my office-mate at work was obsessively in love with and had been mooning over for months. I felt bad about cock-blocking my office-mate (“bird-dogging,” as we said then) and sort of impressedwith myself that I’d scored where he, a much better looking man, had failed.
Then there was the raid, the whimper heard round the world, the fall of our gay Bastille. On June 28, 1969, the bar was raided, and for the first time gays resisted. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms staged the raid, since they’d discovered the liquor bottles in the bar were bootlegged and that the local police precinct was in cahoots with the Mafia owners. As the patrons and workers were being led out of the bar and pushed into a paddy wagon, the angry crowd that had gathered outside began to boo. Then some of the queens inside the van began to fight back—and a few escaped. The crowd was energized by the violence.
Everyone was so pissed off over that particular police raid because once the World’s Fair was over, the cops seemed to forget about us and lots of new bars had opened. There were raids, but only once a month and usually early in the evening, so as not to spoil the later, serious hours of cruising and dancing and flirting and drinking. Now we had a new, handsome mayor, John Lindsay. But he only looked better. He was in constant conflict with the unions, with antiwar protesters, with student radicals who took over Columbia—and with the gay community.
Before the Stonewall uprising there hadn’t really been much of a gay community, just guys cruising Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street. But when the police raided Stonewall and gay men feared their bars were going to be closed once again, all hell broke loose. I was there, just by chance, and I remember thinking it would be the first funny revolution. We were
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