Gay Liberation March in Times Square, 1969. Exhibited at the Schwarzman Building, New York Public Library through June 30. Photo: Diana Davies
On the evening of June 28, 1969, a hundred or so patrons at a gay bar in Greenwich Village, without planning to, ignited a powerful social and political movement in the U.S. and abroad.
The bar was the Stonewall Inn, which was raided that night by the New York City police. Some of the patrons resisted. This simple act had a political and cultural significance which prompted a protest demonstration in Sheridan Square the following night.
A movement was born, and the Stonewall name was carried around the world as a cultural symbol.
The Alliance for the Arts, in honor of the cultural ramifications of Stonewall, is hosting a discussion forum in which writers, artists, historians and activists have contributed brief statements on the cultural importance of Stonewall--what did it change, what does it mean, and how is it remembered in the US and abroad, 40 years later? The public is invited to respond and contribute to this forum.
The Rainbow Pilgrimage on nycgo.com describes lesbian and gay landmarks, Pride Celebration events, and other gay- and lesbian-friendly events and locations.
Randall Bourscheidt
President, Alliance for the Arts
CONTRIBUTORS
For me Stonewall was a public occasion that also marked a crucial turning point in my personal life. I suppose there have been other dates like that (Martin Luther King's assassination or Watergate) but the other ones I can think of were negative in their impact, whereas for me at least Stonewall was entirely positive. Before Stonewall gays considered themselves to be criminals or sinners or mentally ill; after Stonewall they thought of themselves as members of a minority group. It doesn't sound like much but in fact this redefinition gave gays political clout and, more important, the feeling they had the right to that sort of power. We fought back. We asserted ourselves. We took charge of defining ourselves.
The original leaders of the lesbian and gay movement in the 1970s were all political radicals. AIDS in the 1980s saw a transfer of leadership to more middle-class and conventional people, who often were outed by the disease itself. As the LGBT movement became less radical, it became much more assimilationist. The international effort to legalize gay marriage is the final outgrowth of assimilationism. I'm all for it since gays should have the same rights as everyone else, though I personally counsel straight and gay friends not to get married--it's clearly an institution that rarely works.
The goal of leveling all differences seems obtainable--except in the religious parts of
What about the cultural impact of Stonewall? It was only after Stonewall that gay artists began to express themselves openly. Think of Mapplethorpe, who was able to present his images of sado-masochism and of male nudes, especially black male nudes, in a gallery context during the 1970s and 80s. Of course there were earlier photographers treating these subjects, but they were sold under the counter and as pornography.
Or take the writers' group I belonged to, the Violet Quill, which began to form a decade after Stonewall. Of course there had been gay novels before but they were usually apologetic and aimed at straight readers--as shocking or tragic fare. What happened in 1977 was that a number of gay novels were published that provided the reader with no sociology or etiology of queerness and that did not invariably show the gay characters living as a doomed couple far from the gay ghetto. These books did not take the tentative, justifying or lamenting tone of earlier gay fiction. They were reviewed in gay publications, sold in gay bookstores and consumed mainly by gay readers--which meant that gay life no longer needed to be explained to the reader ("There is a place called Fire Island not far from Manhattan but a world apart").
Gender studies and queer studies, as led by the late great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick but promulgated by a wide spectrum of LGBT people, became a major force in American intellectual life in the wake of Stonewall. No one would have dreamed of teaching a course in gay culture at any university before Stonewall. Suddenly in the 1970s there were gay student organizations and gay faculty clubs. Queering the Renaissance, for instance, took a startling and wonderfully revealing new look at the very cornerstone of Western civilization, not to mention the flurry of books about homosexuality in the ancient world, including the third volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality.
The world changed quickly after Stonewall--a date as important in our lives as the Bastille in the evolution of the French republic.
Author Edmund White has written more than a dozen books including his trilogy, "A Boy's Own Story," "The Beautiful Room Is Empty," and "The Farewell Symphony." He is also the editor of "Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS," a project of the Alliance for the Arts, in cooperation with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS.
Stonewall: The Brand
Even as classic American brands such as Chrysler and GM falter, Stonewall as a brand representing gay rights persists. But just as all brands have a tendency to diffuse their meaning, Stonewall has become a symbol that could easily be two-dimensional? In terms of American culture, what does Stonewall mean now?
When culture is defined as art, Stonewall seems to have had the most lasting influence on musical theatre. The musical theatre has always used archetypes to convey broad messages that are reinforced through music and spectacle. One of the most potent of those archetypes is The Outcast. Outcasts, through their "otherness," allow for change and reevaluation among those of us who have become too complacent in our small worlds. The drag queens of Stonewall have surely inspired, in part, the characters of "Rent" who are rejected from the larger world but demand their dignity.
Stonewall also might be seen as a touchstone for some of the experimentation that began in the late 1960s and continued through the 1980s. From the high art of Warhol to the downtown drag spectacles of Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam, misfits were made stars, given a moment in the spotlight very similar to a drag queen standing, blood streaming down her face, under a streetlight in front of the Stonewall Inn. The Outcast defined a new kind of glamour in an artistic milieu where transgression, shock, and barely disguised rage were frequently deployed artistic tools.
The events of June 28, 1969 have continued to shape activist interventions that are also artistic in style. ACT UP and Queer Nation in the late 1980s and early 1990s shared the kind of unfocused rage, paired with a bawdy artistic sensibility, that accounts of Stonewall seem to suggest. The artistic counterpoint of that era was defined by the blowtorch anger of artists like David Wojnarowicz who reveled in their role as despised minorities, turning shame into a badge of courage. Since the mid-90s, however, The Outcast has come in from the cold to warm himself in the warm fires of assimilation. As AIDS became a fact of life for gay men rather than an outrage, gay artists seemed to take comfort in being entertaining rather than threatening.
The legacy of Stonewall is more complex when we discuss culture in the broader sense. We now realize that many of the drag queens of Stonewall were actually transgender women who continue to be a marginalized group within the larger gay community. The transgenders at The Stonewall in 1969 were not choosing to be The Outcast, they were outsiders and rejects by their very nature and likely lived on the very margins of survival, homeless and doing sex work. Yet today we associate Stonewall as an uprising of gay men. In rewriting the history of the people involved in the actual radical rage of Stonewall in 1969, we make it acceptable for transgendered women to be treated with disrespect by gay men in 2009 rather than celebrated as heroes.
The tendency of brands to simplify and homogenize also extends to the East Coast/West Coast ownership struggle around Stonewall. To this day, the gay pride celebration in Los Angeles is called Christopher Street West. But street protests by bar patrons rebelling against police harassment occurred well before 1969 in Los Angeles. And important activist groups such as the Gay Liberation Front, established by Morris Kight in 1958, were established in Los Angeles, making LA at least as important in glbt history as cities such as New York and San Francisco that figure more prominently in glbt history. Using Stonewall as a symbol for the beginning of the modern gay rights movement is not only inaccurate but also reinforces an unhelpful tendency in American culture to see New York as the sole generator of new ideas.
One way to revitalize Stonewall as a brand that accurately captures both the beauty and heartbreak of what occurred on June 28, 1969 is to embrace gay history in all of its messy complexity. It is fitting, therefore, that the Alliance for the Arts (parent organization of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS) should organize a forum on the meaning of Stonewall. The Estate Project preserved thousands of hours of video and artworks ranging from canvases to films and dances created by artists lost to AIDS. These artworks provide a non-linear, highly subjective, emotionally charged record of an era. Perhaps the same strategy needs to be employed around Stonewall to take it from a brand that we use once a year as a reason to gather for a party and restore it as one of many starting points for a battle that will likely continue for sometime to come.
Patrick Moore was the Founding Director of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS and the author of several books including "Beyond Shame" and "Tweaked".
Jonathan Weinberg, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," 2003, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48"
For Gregory
Martin Duberman writes that the Stonewall Riots "are now generally taken to mark the birth of the modern gay and lesbian political movement--that moment in time when gays and lesbians recognized all at once their mistreatment and their solidarity." I was just 12 years old in 1969, and although I grew up in Greenwich Village, not far from Christopher Street, I don't remember the actual riots or the demonstrations that followed. Nevertheless, I would never have come to do my work in queer art history or make paintings of beautiful naked men if it were not for that extraordinary night when gay people stood up and refused to be treated as criminals and second-class citizens. Yet for all of the importance of Stonewall for my sense of identity and my art, much of my research as an art historian has concentrated on revealing the way gay artists long before 1969 represented their homosexuality and resisted that shameful dictum "don't ask, don't tell" that is still the military policy of the United States even in this age of Obama. Or to put it another way, "the love that dare not speak its name" did in fact speak throughout the 20th century. As early as the 1910s, when the painter Charles Demuth was told that a vice commission was investigating various forms of illicit sexual behavior in his hometown of Lancaster, he said that he was "going home to speak for vice." Speaking for vice could be the mantra of so many artists in the 20th century, from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol, Romaine Brooks to David Hockney, George Platt Lynes to Nan Goldin, if by vice we mean a refusal of Puritanism and the restrictions society places on desire and so many forms of so-called deviancy.
Only lately have I spent much time thinking about the immediate effects of the Stonewall riots on the art world. I am in the midst of writing a book on the piers along the West Side Highway in the 1970s and 1980s. These piers were the site of works of art by both straight and gay artists including Vito Acconci, Alvin Baltrop, Gordon Matta-Clark, Joan Jonas, Arthur Tress, and David Wojnarowicz. They were also the place where gay men cruised and had public sex. Just a few weeks ago my research took me to the Archives of American Art to look through the papers of the art critic Gregory Battcock. I had been told that he may have spent some time at the docks in the 1970s. As it turns out, he didn't seem to frequent the piers; his favorite cruising spot was Riverside Drive where he had many nightly encounters. But in the process of going through his papers I found almost the entire run of Gay, a newspaper that was published directly after the Stonewall riots and in which writers like Vito Russo and Taylor Mead commented on gay culture and documented the gay liberation movement that was spawned by Stonewall. Battcock, whom I had only known as the editor of academic anthologies on Minimalism and Pop Art, wrote a weekly column in Gay entitled "The Last Estate," in which he gossiped about the art world and talked of his travels in Europe and Puerto Rico. I was amazed to read his hilarious reports about art historians cruising backroom bars in San Francisco during the annual College Arts Association conference. Battcock's musings in Gay appeared alongside articles about oral sex and reports about the truck scene and bathhouses. Looking through the pages of Gay, with its mixture of politics, art, sex and gossip, gave me a real sense of the radicalism of the years just after Stonewall. Gay liberation was not just about gaining equal rights; it was about expressing a new kind of sexuality, one that was not based on bourgeois norms of marriage and monogamy. Coming out of the closet for certain men at this time meant more than just declaring you were gay; it meant having sex with multiple partners in public and quasi-public spaces.
As someone who went to graduate school in the 1980s, I took on some of the prejudices of queer studies about the Stonewall period. Many of us in the queer movement thought the earlier generation was made up of unsophisticated essentialists who were locked into a narrow conception of sexual identity. Looking through Gay and other of the queer magazines of the 1970s total disabused me of the idea that the Stonewall generation was a bunch of mustached clones and motorcycle dykes. On the contrary, there seemed to be such a marvelous sense of play among the writers about what constitutes masculinity and femininity--and a willingness to imagine a completely open society in which somehow we all would be free of debilitating prejudices and hang-ups about the body and what constitutes the normal and the beautiful. I know I am romanticizing these years--I know sexism and racism were rampant in many gay male subcultures. Yet I am so drawn to the rawness and authenticity of this early publication, particularly when it is compared to slick gay publications today. To put it another way, the Stonewall generation as represented in the pages of Gay and in Battcock's column seems far queerer--stranger, more experimental and imaginative--than many of the self-declared "queers" of my generation. Certainly writers like Battcock would be surprised that the central focus of the gay civil rights movement today is advocating for government sanctified same-sex marriages. For so many of the Stonewall generation the great fight was not to get married, not to serve in the military, not to be a good citizen of the state.
I don't know what Gregory Battcock would have said about gay marriage; he was murdered in Puerto Rico in 1980. I am now just beginning to read his writings and get a measure of the man. I am thinking about the ways in which his work as a gay activist who disturbed hierarchies interacted with his role as someone who conceptualized and categorized the New York art scene in the 1970s. These rushed and very provisional thoughts about Stonewall, before and after, are dedicated to him.
Editors: Randall Bourscheidt, Christina Knight and Joe Harrell
Consulting Editor: Brennan
Gerard
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