New York City - Night of June 28-29, 1969
…Now there were four cops—the two chick dicks had disappeared—and like 200 patrons. The cops told some of us “Get your asses outside, and then get the fuck out of here”—I was one of them—but when I squeezed out the front door onto the street, I realized that tonight was different. At most busts, the cops’d arrest the queens, and the street kids and junkies would slip away, around the corners and up the alleys, and the straight dudes in from Jersey would hid their faces and sneak off to their cars.
But tonight was different. Tonight, nobody was leaving. In fact, there was a crowd growing, just across the street, looking back at the noise and the clamor inside the Inn. I saw street kids I knew, and junkies, perched on top of mailboxes and hanging from light posts—even a few sitting in trees. There were dykes in men’s suits, and a few queens who the cops had freed rather than busting, and they were lined up in ranks, and their faces were grim. As I crossed Christopher, and stepped up among them, I heard one baritone voice say “This shit has got to stop” and there were grunts and “That’s right!” rejoinders and nods of agreement. And the crowd kept getting bigger and bigger.
Now it wasn’t just folks from inside the Stonewall, but even passers-by, and guys stepping out of the Irish bar just down the street. There were writers and musicians among us, and you could feel the restlessness in the crowd, and then, as the cops started hauling the arrested queens out through the narrow front door, I and a couple of other people stepped down off the curb, heading toward them.
The patrol wagon was sitting there, its back doors open, and the first of the cops, a fat Italian-looking guy with sideburns and hair out from under his cap and curling over his collar, grabbed the queen he was escorting and yanked her toward the truck, saying “Come on, you fucking faggot.” The queen, who was taller than the cop, and had broader shoulders, suddenly yanked her arm away, and said “Fuck you, Officer Friendly,” and swung her purse at the cop. She didn’t connect, but then someone behind me yelled “Leave her alone, you fucking pig,” and a beer bottle sailed out of the crowd and exploded against the curb—it sounded like a bomb going off. The fat cop whirled around and yelled, in a Brooklyn accent, “who threw that shit? Which one ‘a’ you assholes?” No one answered, but a moment later someone threw a half-full trash can toward the wagon; it fell short, but it clanged on the cobbles and then rolled in an arc away to one side, spilling trash the whole way.
And then I heard another voice yelling above the tumult, and I recognized it. They were hauling Stormé DeLarverie away toward one of the paddy wagons—Stormé, a a singer and butch dyke who was bigger and stronger than most cops, and carried a pistol to protect the street queens. And she must have hit one of the cops—she wasn’t afraid of anything—and now they were hitting on her shoulders and back as they wrestled her out of the Stonewall’s front door. She was bleeding—one of them must have hit her on the side of her head with a nightstick—and she turned around and yelled at the rest of us who were gaping at the violence—those who hadn’t run away—and she yelled “Well, aren’t you bitches gonna do something?!” Three more bottles flew out of the crowd: two of them shattered in the street, but one of them hit one of the cops holding Stormé.
And something inside me just snapped. Maybe it was the fight in the Haight that I’d run away from, almost two years before and three thousand miles away; maybe it was the memory of Etsy saying “Get fucking going, and don’t look back” as the cops swarmed him; maybe it was the kids who’d been beaten and bloodied, in Chicago, and Detroit; maybe it was Fred Hampton and Mark Clarke murdered in their beds by Daley’s pigs, maybe it was just those weeks on the road and months of suffering—but something just snapped. There was a flash of red behind my eyes, and as I saw one of the helmeted Tac cops—big beefy guy with a red face and a gut—wind up to swing on Stormé again, I took two steps forward, and I hooked his arm, the way Etsy had taught me. I yanked backward, and I heard the crunch as his shoulder popped out of the socket. The cop yelled in pain, and sagged, and his nightstick dropped to the ground.
One of his buddies turned, and saw the cop on his knees cradling his arm. I scooped up the nightstick, and set up on the second cop, even as he fumbled to unbutton the flap on his pistol’s holster. But before he cleared leather—before I could even swing—Stormé had wrenched away from the third cop, who by now was only half holding her arm, and her revolver was in her hand. She hit that third cop in the face with the butt, and turned to face the second, who had swung to level his pistol at her. And then, from behind him, a screaming queen, her wig slipping off her head, half falling of her heels, hit with a brick. He went down too.
And then there was a surge from the mob, of the queens and street kids and the passing bystanders and the musicians and the writers and the closeted Jersey guys who’d escaped getting trapped inside the Inn, and they rolled forward. Those cops looked up, and I’m not sure they understood what was happening, but they knew it was nothing good. They literally dropped what they were doing, the people they were holding, and turned, and ran back inside the inn. The crowd cheered, and came after them.
The cops got inside, with a few patrons—almost like hostages—and slammed the door and (I think) dropped the security bar, and now the shoe was really on the other foot. The crowd cheered louder, and a few of them started kicking at the door, and then somebody picked up a piece of loose re-bar from a half-fixed pothole, and, aiming between the criss-cross slats of the decorative ironwork, smashed the window to the left of the door. You could hear the cops inside now, yelling, and one of them screaming into the phone for backup. Somebody else set a can of trash on fire—maybe they spilled a drink in it or something—and a couple of people picked up the flaming trash can and hurled it at the window. People were yelling and screaming “fuck the pigs!” “Not in our streets!” “The streets belong to us!” and now there were people grabbing up loose cobblestones and hammering on the barred door. “Burn ‘em out!” “No more!” “Leave ‘em alone!” In the distance, I could hear sirens approaching from several different directions.
The incredible thing is that, even then, and even when the Tactical cops—the real Gestapo—showed up, the most hardcore of the crowd wouldn’t leave. Three different TPF vans screeched around the corners at both ends of Christopher, two from the Sixth Ave side and one from Seventh, and the crowd still didn’t run. Yeah, they backed up, and maybe some of the Jersey tourists, or the passers-by who’d gotten caught up in the thing. But even when the Tac cops came storming out of their wagons with their big blue helmets and their nightsticks, and ran at us in a phalanx—the street kids and junkies would just melt away into the shadows of the side alleys, and the darkness under the tenements, and then two minutes later, they’d pop up out of nowhere around another corner, behind the cops, throwing stones and cursing and taunting them.
It happened to me, too: I came running blindly, with a bunch of the kids, around a corner, and almost cannoned into another crew of cops from behind. They didn’t even see us, because they were staring diagonally across Christopher, gaping at the size of the crowd that cursed and shouted and threw rocks at the Stonewall—some of them were pounding on the heavy door. Inside the Inn, you could literally hear flames crackling, and cop voices yelling to the Tac guys, struggling through the crowd, to get them out.
I turned to look in the other direction, across Christopher, and fpr a moment I gaped—almost rubbed my eyes, like in the movies, because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. On the other side of the street, there was a line of queens, kicking up their heels like a can-can line, and singing “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay.”
And then a nightstick took me across the back of the neck, and I couldn’t see or hear anything at all.
I woke up two hours later in the Henry Street station, sprawled across a bench in a cell, with a splitting headache and blood on my collar. The barred door of the cell was half open, and Marsha Johnson, this beautiful tall street queen I knew, was saying to the desk cop, in her baritone voice: “Officer, I’ve got the money to get this young man out. The way this works is, you take this cash, and you seal it in that envelope from the stack on your desk, and you sign a receipt and give me the receipt, and I watch you slide that envelope into the safe there. This ain’t my first time bailing out one of my boys and I know how this works. If you want me out of your face, you’ll do your job, take this money, and leave this little white boy go.”
Which he did: there were so many who’d been arrested that they couldn’t keep us all, so the cops let a lot of us out anyway, bail money or no.
Marsha walked me back here, to this flophouse on East 10th, holding onto my arm so I wouldn’t weave into the traffic—I was still pretty dizzy and out of it, and I could tell I was going to need another fix before too very long. The sky in the east was getting light as she gave me six bucks for a room, and kissed me on the cheek, and said, “go wash your face and rest, little man. I think you’re at the end of your tether.” And I did that, and now I’m sitting here in this room. Alone.
But—despite the headache and the exhaustion—I can’t sleep. So instead I’ve added everything that seems to be left of this story, and I’ve gotten to the last few pages on my last yellow legal pad, the last in the big stack I’ve hauled around for all these years.
I don’t think I’ve got anything else left to say.
Maybe last night was the high water mark: maybe for a few brief minutes we could still felt like, even after Malcolm and the Haight and Chicago and Martin and Bobby and heroin and New York’s cold streets, maybe last night at the Stonewall, when we turned around and defied the cops and took back the streets that belong to us, maybe that was it: the last moment when we felt like we were going to win.
But I don’t believe it, not really. I think maybe Marsha was right: I’m at the end of my tether, in more ways than one. I feel like maybe it’s just time to let go.
Maybe that decade was as good, maybe we laid some foundations for a better future. But maybe the hopes and dreams that we took into it were just too childish. And I think maybe it’s over. I’ve got enough cash left, from the money that Marsha gave me, for one big last blast of H.
Maybe we were too weak. Or maybe I was. I don’t know.
I wish our story had been different.