Queer Prehistory

Queer Prehistory

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4550/queer_prehistory/

The gay-rights movement did not begin with the Stonewall riots in 1969.

By Doug Ireland
July 16, 2009

Myth has it that the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich
Village were the first open queer rebellion against discrimination.
Not so. In 1965, the first queer sit-ins on record took place at a
late-night Philadelphia coffee shop and lunch counter called Dewey's,
a popular hangout for young gays, lesbians and drag queens.

The establishment began refusing service to this LGBT clientele,
prompting a protest rally on April 25, 1965. Dewey's management
turned away more than 150 patrons while the demonstration went on
outside. Four teens resisted efforts to force them out and were
arrested and later convicted of disorderly conduct. In the ensuing
weeks, Dewey's patrons and others from Philadelphia's gay community
set up an informational picket line protesting the lunch counter's
treatment of gender-variant youth. On May 2, activists staged another
sit-in, and the police were again called, but this time made no
arrests. The restaurant backed down, and promised "an immediate
cessation of all indiscriminate denials of service."

In August 1966, there was a riot at Compton's Cafeteria, a 24-hour
San Francisco eatery popular with drag queens and other
gender-benders, hustlers, runaway teens and cruising gays. The
Compton's management had begun calling police to roust this
nonconformist clientele, and one night a drag queen precipitated the
riot by throwing a cup of coffee into the face of a cop who was
trying to drag her away. Plates, trays, cups and silverware were soon
hurtling through the air, police paddy wagons arrived, and street
fighting broke out. Some of the 60 or so rioting drag queens hit the
cops with their heavy purses, a police car was vandalized and a
newspaper stand was burned down. The Compton's Riot eventually led to
the appointment of the first police liaison to the gay community.

These are just two of the many nuggets of little-known or forgotten
queer history to be found in Smash the Church, Smash the State: The
Early Years of Gay Liberation (City Lights, June 2009), the new
anthology edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca, himself a veteran of the
earliest gay liberation struggles, and today a San Francisco-based
gender-bending performance artist.

By the time of the Stonewall riots in June 1969, rebellion and
radicalism were in the air. The country had been riven by the mass
agitation against the war in Vietnam. America's cities had exploded
in urban riots by the black underclass. Feminists had begun to
articulate their own liberation ideology and burn their bras.
Stonewall and the militant gay liberation movement to which it gave
birth arose out of this '60s turbulence.

If the first night of the Stonewall riots was spontaneous, the
ensuing nights benefited from activist participation. Mark Segal, who
for 32 years has been the publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News
writes, "Marty Robinson recruited me into the 'activist group,' a
subgroup of Mattachine New York. If there were organizers of the
demonstrations on the nights following the [first] Stonewall riot, it
was us. After the first incident in which cops raided the bar, Marty
had the brilliant idea to have us write in chalk on Christopher
Street, 'Stonewall Tomorrow Night.' For three more nights, we
gathered and protested."

Stonewall became the much-evoked milestone because it was followed by
the launch of a concrete and militant political organization, the Gay
Liberation Front (GLF). Within two years, imitators of the New York
GLF had launched some 300 independent Gay Liberation Front cells
across the country. At GLF demonstrations, one frequently heard the
chant "2-4-6-8, smash the church, smash the state!"­hence the title
of Avicolli Mecca's collection of articles.

Nick Benton, a founder of the Berkeley Gay Liberation Front, writes
that for him and his fellow GLF activists, "gay liberation was part
of the larger struggle of human beings for liberation, in solidarity
with the civil rights, anti-war, feminist, and Third World liberation
struggles."

The personal testimonies collected for Smash the Church, Smash the
State! help recreate those heady, joyously rambunctious days of "sex,
drugs, and rock 'n roll." Queers, influenced by the hippies, Yippies
and Zippies, built their own radical wing of the youth counterculture
and created their own influential publications­including Boston's Fag
Rag, which published the notorious Charlie Shively article,
"Cocksucking As an Act of Revolution."

There are contributions by women who tired of the male domination of
GLF and founded groups like RadicalLesbians, RedStockings and
Dyketactics. There are also accounts both of radical gay liberation's
earliest and often campy direct actions and of the factional fights
that eventually destroyed GLF and led to its replacement by the much
larger­and single-issue­Gay Activists Alliance.

Avicolli Mecca has not abandoned the anarchic radicalism of those
early days. He writes in his introduction, "In many ways, the new
millennium gay movement is the antithesis of the early '70s gay
liberation. It cavorts with politicians who may be good on gay
issues, but not on concerns affecting other disenfranchised
communities. It courts corporate support for its … pride parades,
which used to be be protest marches and celebrations of the Stonewall
Riots. Now those marches seem more of a market than a movement."

On this 40th anniversary of Stonewall, that's a critique that
deserves to be heard.

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