The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (36 page)

I checked with the sarge that afternoon. I always did, when I was off-duty and felt the urge and knew I couldn't fight it, knew I'd have to find a place to dance it out of me. I was lucky I was a cop and could check to make sure I wouldn't get swept up in a raid. Nothing was on the list for the Stonewall that night. That's how I know for a fact that what went down that night was not your standard gay club raid. Someone upstairs was pulling strings.

I spent the whole week agonizing over whether or not to go. That's how it always went. I'd wrestle with my fear and shame, and win, and go, and then feel so miserable and ashamed afterward that I leapt back into the closet for another few weeks. I needed some action, some booze, and some sweat and some sex with a stranger. Quentin and I had gone to the gym together, that afternoon, and I knew he had to work that night. He didn't ask where I was going when I went out. Even twins are allowed to have little secrets. But he was the reason I stayed in the closet, and was always so careful to not get dragnetted. Seeing my name in the paper in a story on a gay bar raid—that would kill Quentin quicker and deader than any bullet.

The world changed in two huge ways that night.

In the first place, the world changed because the gays fought back. The police and the press were equally dumbfounded by the idea that a bar full of fairies would refuse to submit to one of the raids that were standard—if monstrously unjust—operating procedure. The Stonewall itself had been raided less than a week before. The night of June 28, 1969, should have been no different.

Secondly, the Stonewall Uprising was the first public demonstration of the supernatural phenomenon that would later be called by names as diverse as collective pyrokinesis, group magic, communal energy, polykinesis, multipsionics, liberation flame, and hellfire.

None of the eleven different city, state, and federal government agencies that investigated the events of that night have ever confirmed or even acknowledged the overwhelming number of witness testimonies describing the events that caused the police to so catastrophically lose control of a routine operation. The facts, however, do not seem to be in doubt. Ten police officers were vaporized that night, vanishing so utterly that the NYPD still considers them missing persons. Three more were cooked alive, charred to the point where dental records were needed to identify the bodies. No incendiary or flammable substances were found at the scene. Five paddy wagons full of arrestees were stopped when their engines spontaneously overheated, and the metal doors of the wagons were melted away to free the people inside—yet no blowtorches or welding equipment were found at the scene.

Since testimonials are all that's left to those of us frustrated with the Official Version, the oral history format seems to be our best bet. I know that many of the most outspoken voices of the Stonewall Uprising have reacted with anger and hostility at the news that I, of all journalists, was planning to compile such a history, and are urging their comrades not to speak with me. I understand their objections, and have precious little to show by way of proof that I've changed. I simply cannot not tell this story.

—Jenny Trent, Editor (formerly of the
New York Times
)

Craig Perry, university administration employee

I know it's dumb, but I felt like I had failed. Rage hadn't gotten me anywhere. Being black, being gay, I'd been raising hell my whole life. Screaming nonstop, at the top of my lungs, at the bullies and the cops and the priests and the rest of the hateful sons of bitches, trying to get my brothers and sisters to stand up together, and for what? The world was still so rotten that beautiful creatures like Judy Garland couldn't wait to get out of it. Sadness felt like the only rational response to a world like that.

Walking wasn't enough, so I went to the gym to get my mind off things. It didn't work. The twins were there, but not even the sight of
them
could cheer me up. One bearded and one mustachioed, both of their bodies the same impossible lumberjack/rugby player shape, wide-necked and wide-thighed, who did not seem to have aged a day in the seven years I'd been going to that gym. Sadness kept swallowing me back up, distracting me from the spectacle of them, happy and secure in their bubble of hetero-bro confidence. By the time I walked out of there, I was feeling incurably alone.

All I kept thinking was,
Tonight, more than any other night, I need to dance. I need to be among my people.

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop

Stonewall was fucking depressing. People paint it as this great place where you could be who you really were. If that's who you really were, you were really fucked. Run by the mob, painted all black inside, stinking of mold and charred wood because it had been boarded shut for twenty years after a big fire. I mean, every gay bar was a piece of shit—what did you expect when you couldn't operate legally? The State Liquor Authority wouldn't issue licenses to gay bars, and nobody runs illegal businesses but the mob. They didn't even have running water, just a big plastic trough behind the bar, where they'd dunk the used glasses and then use them again. Not even any soap. The summer it opened there was a hepatitis outbreak.

But you went, because where else were you going to go? How else could you escape from the crushing weight of your waking life, and be among your own sick, twisted, beautiful kind?

Sergeant Abraham Asher, NYPD 6th Precinct police chief

We knew it was a full moon. Basic rule of policing: Don't do crowd-control-type stuff on full moon nights. I don't know why—people just lose their minds a little easier. This one had some pressure from upstairs, though, and was kind of a last-minute decision. But I can tell you this for goddamn sure: If I'da known Judy Garland had just died, we'd never have gone anywhere near the damn place.

That night essentially ruined my life. I got demoted. Every article painted me as a colossal idiot, and that's taken a huge toll on my family. But I got no cause to complain, because a lot of my men didn't come back from that night.

I used to think that faggots were poor creatures who couldn't help their perversion. I've changed my mind about that. Now I know for a fact they're born of hellfire and bent on burning us all up. And that we ought to put them all on a big boat, put it out to sea, and torpedo the son of a bitch.

Shelly Bronsky, bookstore owner

I was a waitress then, at the Stonewall, although “waitress” is a stretch. We picked up glasses and gave them to the bartenders, and we kept the cigar boxes full of money—no cash register, ever, or the cops would take it away during a raid as evidence that we were selling liquor without a license, as opposed to holding a private party, which is what the mob lawyers would argue to get the case against the building owner thrown out. We mopped up the toilets when they overflowed, which was always. At the end of every night, we'd go through the garbage of the neighboring bars and steal empty bottles of top-shelf liquor, so the next night when the mob guys came through, they could fill them up with their own shitty diluted bootleg stuff.

Sergeant Abraham Asher, NYPD 6th Precinct police chief

I hated the raids. We had to do them, because you can't just let filth and sickness fester in your city, but going into those places made my officers really lose their shit.

By midnight we were in position around the corner, thirty cops, waiting for the signal from the undercovers we'd sent inside. That was standard for a raid—undercovers went in early, always women, to finger the people who worked there, because those were more serious charges. The Stonewall had a big heavy door with wooden reinforcements, so every time we raided the place, it would take us six or seven minutes to break it down and get inside, and in that time the workers would drop everything and blend in with the crowd. Once we were in, it'd be like no one worked there.

But that night, it was weird. We kept waiting and our girls inside did not come out, and I tried to radio headquarters and couldn't get through. So we got pretty antsy pretty fast.

Tricksie Barron, unemployed

You got to talk to somebody else for that. I was there, but I was so drunk that night that we might have called up a bunch of flying monkeys to burn it down. All I remember is, I met the man of my dreams that night. I meet him most nights, but this one was extra special. Complimented my dress and everything. While we were dancing, he grabbed me by the ass, pulled me close, and said, “I like a girl who's packing more heat than me.”

Craig Perry, university administration employee

It was a rough night for the older queens. Men wept like babies for Judy. I stood in their midst, baffled. What was wrong with them, these fools, these people, my people, dancing like all was well in the world? I wanted to grab them, shake them, fill them up with the rage that choked me.

A lot of them were men I'd been seeing there for the longest. Many had lost everything over the years, for being who they were, for living in the world they lived in. But they were too beaten down to ever fight back. Less than a month before, when I tried to organize a campaign against the
New York Times
for its policy of publishing the names of men arrested in vice raids—lists that invariably got everyone on them fired or divorced or sometimes institutionalized and lobotomized against their will—not a one of them wanted to do a damn thing.

Judy Garland got played again and again, sparking fresh tears and howls each time a song started. A bunch of women I had never seen before, who looked like they wandered into the wrong bar by mistake, joined in on a sing-along to the fifth straight time someone played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Now I know they must have been the undercovers, but then I just thought they were confused tourists.

I watched them dance, the poorest of our poor, the kids who got beaten and thrown out and sometimes way worse. Smokey Robinson said,
Take a gooood look at my face,
and they all sang along, even the boy with the scar across his face shaped like the iron his mother burned him with.

Again I thought about the twins at the gym, men of steel or stone, their bodies as perfect as the bond between them. I had never known any bond remotely like that. I was forty that summer, and I had come to believe that loneliness was an essential and ineluctable aspect of gay identity, or at least my own.

Diana Ross came on the radio. We danced, and we sang,
I hear a symphony,
and we
were
the symphony, for as long as the song lasted.

Annabelle Kowalski, stenographer

Judy who? Child, please. Don't you let the gay boys hoodwink you. Sure, some old queens were crying in their beer to “Over the Rainbow” that night, but divas die every day and nobody bursts into flames. That shit happened because we
made
it happen.

The raid itself came at one in the morning. I was in bed already. I lived a block and a half away. I heard the screams and shouts. I went to the window and saw two young black men, laughing, running. I hollered down, asked what was happening.

“Riot at the Stonewall!” they shouted. “Us faggots is fighting back!”

And I don't know how, but I knew this was my story. My chance. I pulled a jacket on over my bedclothes and ran.

—Jenny Trent, Editor (formerly of the
New York Times
)

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop

What you need to know is that I was
always
scared when I did stuff like that. Meeting men in darkness under the West Side Highway, accepting hurried blowjobs on late-night subway platforms, entering the Stonewall, I always expected the worst. It's ridiculous, but I wished Quentin could have been there. I never felt whole or safe without him. But of course he couldn't be.

We were dancing, all of us, packed together in that shitty room, hot and sweaty and happy. And for once, I wasn't scared. For once, I felt good and happy about who and where I was. We were safe there, from the cops and the mob and all the other bad men, safe in the heat our bodies made together.

I don't know what was different. I never liked dancing before. For me, like for a lot of the Stonewall boys, dancing was what you did to figure out who you were going home with. But what I felt that night was a lot like what I had always felt at the gym, the same sense of power and energy, except without the constant shame and terror that I always felt around Quentin. The fear that he'd see me staring at some boy's backside, or spot some infinitesimal fraction of an erection, and Know Everything.

What I felt that night was joy. There is no other word for it.

This,
I kept thinking.
This is sacred. This is joy.

My twin brother and I added up to something, together. Quentin made me feel love, power, and safety, but never joy. We were locked into each other, a closed loop that gave us much but took away more.

People have told me that maybe if I had been honest with him, things would have gone down differently. I'd still have him. They're right, of course, every time. And every time, I want to punch them in the face until my fist comes out the other side.

Craig Perry, university administration employee

The frenzy was on me by then, and I was dancing like I might die when I stopped.

I danced up on a short built sparkplug of a man with his back to me. The shape of his ass assured me he'd be a prime catch.

That's when the house lights came up, blindingly bright and white, flickering like a theater warning us intermission was ending. I'd been caught up in a raid before. Taken to the precinct along with twenty other guys, and one of them got so scared because his name would be in the paper and his parents would find out and disown him, he jumped out the second-story window—and got impaled on the points of a wrought-iron fence. Took them six hours to get him off of there, with blowtorches and everything, and when they brought him to St. Vincent's, he still had spikes of iron in him. He survived, but he wished he hadn't.