The Martin Duberman Reader (13 page)

Most of the employees at Stonewall, and some of the customers, did drugs, primarily “uppers.” Desbutal—a mix of Desoxyn and
Nembutal—was a great favorite (though later banned by the FDA), and the bar was also known as a good place to buy acid. The chief supplier was Maggie Jiggs, a famous queen who worked the main bar at Stonewall, along with his partner, Tommy Long. (Tommy kept a toy duck on the bar that quacked whenever someone left a tip.) They were a well-known team with a big following. Maggie, blond, chubby, and loud, knew everybody's business and would think nothing of yelling out in the middle of the crowded bar, “Hey, girl, I hear you got a whole new plate of false teeth from that fabulous dentist you been fucking!” But Maggie loved people, had good drugs, was always surrounded by gorgeous men, and arranged wonderful three-ways, so his outspokenness, and even his occasional thievery, were usually forgiven.

Maggie and Tommy were stationed behind the main bar, one of two bars in Stonewall. But before you could get to it, you had to pass muster at the door (a ritual some of the customers welcomed as a relief from the lax security that characterized most gay bars). That usually meant inspection through peepholes in the heavy front door by Ed Murphy, “Bobby Shades,” or muscular Frank Esselourne. “Blond Frankie,” as he was known, was gay, but in those years not advertising it, and was famous for being able to spot straights or undercover cops with a single glance.

If you got the okay at the door—and for underage street kids that was always problematic—you moved a few steps to a table usually covered by members of what one wag called the Junior Achievement Mafia team. That could mean, on different nights, Zookie; Mario; Ernie Sgroi, who always wore a suit and tie and whose father had started the famed Bon Soir on Eighth Street; “Vito,” who was on salary directly from Fat Tony, was hugely proud of his personal collection of SS uniforms and Nazi flags, and made bombs on the side; or “Tony the Sniff” Verra, who had a legendary nose for no-goods and kept a baseball bat behind the door to deal with them.

At the table, you had to plunk down three dollars (one dollar on weekdays), for which you got two tickets that could be exchanged for two watered-down drinks. (According to Chuck Shaheen, all
drinks were watered down, even those carrying the fanciest labels.) You then signed your name in a book kept to prove, should the question arise in court, that Stonewall was indeed a private “bottle club.” People rarely signed their real names. “Judy Garland,” “Donald Duck,” and “Elizabeth Taylor” were the popular favorites.

Once inside Stonewall, you took a step down and straight in front of you was the main bar where Maggie held court. Behind the bar some pulsating gel lights went on and off—later exaggeratedly claimed by some to be the precursor of the innovative light shows at the Sanctuary and other gay discos that followed. On weekends, a scantily clad go-go boy with a pin spot on him danced in a gilded cage on top of the bar. Straight ahead, beyond the bar, was a spacious dancing area, at one point in the bar's history lit only with black lights. That in itself became a subject for camp, because the queens, with Murine in their eyes, all looked as if they had white streaks running down their faces. Should the police (known as Lily Law, Alice Blue Gown—Alice for short—or Betty Badge) or a suspected plainclothesman unexpectedly arrive, white bulbs instantly came on in the dance area, signaling everyone to stop dancing or touching.

The queens rarely hung out at the main bar. There was another, smaller room off to one side, with a stone wishing well in the middle, its own jukebox and service bar, and booths. That became headquarters for the more flamboyant contingent in Stonewall's melting pot of customers. There were the “scare drag queens” like Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, Birdie Rivera, and Martin Boyce—“boys who looked like girls but who you knew were boys.” And there were the “flame” (not drag) queens who wore eye makeup and teased hair, but essentially dressed in male clothes—though an effeminate version with fluffy sweaters and Tom Jones shirts.

Only a few favored full-time transvestites, like Tiffany, Spanola Jerry (a hairdresser from Sheepshead Bay), and Tammy Novak, who performed at the Eighty-Two Club, were allowed to enter Stonewall in drag. (Tammy sometimes transgressed by dressing as a boy.) Not even “Tish” (Joe Tish) would be admitted, though he'd been a well-known
drag performer since the early fifties when he'd worked at the Moroccan Village on Eighth Street, and though in the late sixties he had a long-running show at the Crazy Horse, a nearby café on Bleecker Street. Tish
was
admitted into some uptown straight clubs in full drag; there, as he sniffily put it, his “artistry” was recognized.

The queens considered Stonewall and Washington Square the most congenial downtown bars. If they passed muster at the Stonewall door, they could buy or cajole drinks, exchange cosmetics and the favored Tabu or Ambush perfume, admire or deplore somebody's latest Kanekalon wig, make fun of six-foot transsexual Lynn's size-twelve women's shoes (while admiring her fishnet stockings and miniskirts and giggling over her tales of servicing the firemen around the corner at their Tenth Street station), move constantly in and out of the ladies room (where they deplored the fact that a single red lightbulb made the application of makeup difficult), and dance in a feverish sweat till closing time at 4:00
A.M.

The jukebox on the dance floor played a variety of songs, even an occasional “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” to appease the romantics. The Motown label was still top of the heap in the summer of 1969; three of the five hit singles for the week of June 28—by Marvin Gaye, Junior Walker, and the Temptations—carried its imprint. On the pop side, the Stonewall jukebox played the love theme from the movie version of
Romeo and Juliet
over and over, the record's saccharine sound periodically cut by the Beatles' “Get Back” or Elvis Presley's “In the Ghetto.” And all the new dances—the Boston Jerk, the Monkey, the Spider—were tried out with relish. If the crowd was in a particularly campy mood—and the management was feeling loose enough—ten or fifteen dancers would line up to learn the latest ritual steps, beginning with a shouted “Hit it, girls!”

The chino-and-penny-loafer crowd pretty much stayed near the main bar, fraternizing with the queens mostly on the dance floor, if at all. (“Two queens can't bump pussy,” one of them explained. “And I don't care how beefy and brawny the pussy is. And certainly not for a relationship.”) The age range at Stonewall was mostly
late teens to early thirties; the over-thirty-five crowd hung out at Julius's, and the leather crowd (then in its infancy) at Keller's. There could also be seen at Stonewall just a sprinkling of the new kind of gay man beginning to emerge: hippie, long-haired, bell-bottomed, laid back, and likely to have “weird,” radical views.

Very few women ever appeared in the Stonewall. Sascha L., who in 1969 briefly worked the door, flatly declares that he can't remember
any
, except for the occasional “fag hag” (like Blond Frankie's straight friend Lucille, who lived with the doorman at One-Two-Three and hung out at Stonewall), or “one or two dykes who looked almost like boys.” But Chuck Shaheen, who spent much more time at Stonewall, remembers—while acknowledging that the bar was “98 percent male”—a few more lesbian customers than Sascha does, and, of those, a number who were decidedly femme. One of the lesbians who did go to Stonewall “a few times,” tagging along with some of her gay male friends, recalls that she “felt like a visitor.” It wasn't as if the male patrons went out of their way to make her feel uncomfortable, but rather that the territory was theirs, not hers: “There didn't seem to be hostility, but there didn't seem to be camaraderie.”

The Stonewall management had always been tipped off by the police before a raid took place—this happened, on average, once a month—and the raid itself was usually staged early enough in the evening to produce minimal commotion and allow for a quick reopening. Indeed, sometimes the “raid” consisted of little more than the police striding arrogantly through the bar and then leaving, with no arrests made. Given the size of the weekly payoff, the police had an understandable stake in keeping the golden calf alive.

But the raid on June 28, 1969, was different. It was carried out by a mixed group of detectives from the First Division (only one of them in uniform), the Morals Squad, and even Consumer Affairs; the Sixth Precinct had been asked to participate only at the last minute as backup. Moreover, the raid had occurred at 1:20
A.M.
—the height of the merriment—and with no advance warning to the
Stonewall management. (Chuck Shaheen recalls some vague tip-off that a raid
might
happen, but since the early-evening hours had passed without incident, the management had dismissed the tip as inaccurate.)

There have been an abundance of theories as to why the Sixth Precinct failed on this occasion to alert Stonewall's owners. One centers on the possibility that a payment had not been made on time or made at all. Another suggests that the extent of Stonewall's profits had recently become known to the police, and the Sixth Precinct brass had decided, as a prelude to its demand for a larger cut, to flex a little muscle. Yet a third explanation points to the possibility that Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine held a special grudge against the Mafia owners of Stonewall, and a fourth held that the new commanding officer at the precinct was out of sympathy with payoffs—or hadn't yet learned how profitable they could be.

But evidence has surfaced to suggest that the machinations of the Sixth Precinct were in fact incidental to the raid. Ryder Fitzgerald, a sometime carpenter who had helped remodel the Stonewall interior and whose friends Willis and Elf (a straight hippie couple) lived rent-free in the apartment above Stonewall in exchange for performing caretaker chores, was privy the day after the raid to a revealing conversation. Ernie, one of the Stonewall's Mafia team, stormed around Willis and Elf's apartment, cursing (in Ryder's presence) the Sixth Precinct for having failed to provide warning in time. And in the course of his tirade, Ernie purportedly revealed that the raid had been inspired by federal agents. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) had apparently discovered that the liquor bottles used at Stonewall had no federal stamps on them—which meant they'd been hijacked or bootlegged straight out of the distillery. Putting Stonewall under surveillance, BATF had then discovered the bar's corrupt alliance with the Sixth Precinct. Thus when the feds decided to launch a raid on Stonewall, they deliberately kept the precinct in the dark until the unavoidable last minute. The exact combination of factors that led to the raid remains to this day uncertain.

When it did get going, the previous systems put in place by the Mafia owners stood them in good stead. The strong front door bought needed time until the white lights had a chance to do their warning work: patrons instantly stopped dancing and touching, and the bartenders quickly took the money from the cigar boxes that served as cash registers, jumped from behind the bar, and mingled inconspicuously with the customers. Maggie Jiggs, already known for his “two for the bar, one for myself” approach to cash, disappeared into the crowd with a cigar box full of money; when a cop asked to see the contents, Maggie said it contained her tips as a “cigarette girl,” and they let him go. When questioned by his employers later, Maggie claimed that the cop had taken the box
and
the money. She got away with the lie.

The standard Mafia policy of putting gay employees on the door so they could take the heat while everyone else got their act together also paid off for the owners. Ed Murphy managed to get out (“Of course,” his detractors add, “he was on the police payroll”), but Blond Frankie was arrested. There was already a warrant outstanding for Frankie's arrest (purportedly for homicide; he was known for “acting first and not bothering to think even later”). Realizing that this was no ordinary raid, that this time an arrest might not merely mean detention for a few hours at Centre Street, followed by a quick release, Frankie was determined not to be taken in [he later managed to escape]. Owners Zookie and Mario, through a back door connected to the office, were soon safely out on the street in front of Stonewall. So, too, were almost all of the bar's customers, released after their IDs had been checked and their attire deemed “appropriate” to their gender—a process accompanied by derisive, ugly police banter.

As for Fat Tony, at the time the raid took place he had still not left his apartment on Waverly Place, a few blocks from Stonewall. Under the spell of methamphetamine, he'd already spent three hours combing and recombing his beard and agitatedly changing from one outfit to another, acting for all the world like one of those “demented queens” he vilified. He and Chuck Shaheen could see the commotion from their apartment window, but only after an
emergency call from Zookie could Tony be persuaded to leave the apartment for the bar.

Some of the campier patrons, emerging one by one from Stonewall to find an unexpected crowd, took the opportunity to strike instant poses, starlet style, while the onlookers whistled and shouted their applause-meter ratings. But when a paddy wagon pulled up, the mood turned more somber. And it turned sullen when the police officers started to emerge from Stonewall with prisoners in tow and moved with them toward the waiting van. Sylvia Rivera, the street-hustling part-time drag queen, was standing with her boyfriend Gary near the small park across the street from Stonewall, and Craig Rodwell was perched on top of the brownstone stairs near the front of the crowd. They, and others, sensed that something unusual was in the air; all felt a kind of tensed expectancy.