A Guest Essay to Commemorate the Day

Today, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, Gossips shares this essay by author, scholar, former Hudsonian, and valued friend, Byrne Fone.

My Stonewall

Byrne Fone

July 3, 1969 (Lucian Truscott in The Village Voice)

Sheridan Square this weekend looked like something from a William Burroughs novel as the sudden specter of "gay power" erected its brazen head and spat out a fairy tale the likes of which the area has never seen.

In the summer of 1969 we--my "friend," as we said, and I--went to our house on Fire Island and stayed till September, thus avoiding New York City, which I thought I didn't like. And so, in gay Cherry Grove, we remained untouched by the gay and celebratory summers in the city. Our house was called "Pride House," built in 1936, the year of my birth, but its builder, though gay, was a Janeite, not a revolutionary.

We had been together for several years in 1969 and lived in Brooklyn. We had gotten involved somehow in real estate, a pastime in which many gay couples were dabbling, so many in fact that a friend called that speculation "fairies' baseball." We called each other fairies then, without rancor but wryly. Our first house in Brooklyn was a wood frame wreck which I fondly called Greek Revival and into which I poured money, much more than I had. It was on the fringes of respectability. Other houses we eventually acquired were scattered precariously on the edge not only of social but of financial respectability as well. We owned Park Place and Baltic Street; neither were jewels in our crown.

If not at Cherry Grove, we stayed in Brooklyn, from which vantage Manhattan seemed a distant island. Though ten minutes from Wall Street, as the ads liked to say, we were a thousand years from New York City life. We went there now and again to the opera or a show, but we might as well have lived in Staten Island. Together, now and again, we would go into the Village to spend a Saturday afternoon of too many martinis at a friend's dark little apartment five flights above Bleecker Street. He was one of our two Manhattan friends. The other lived on 71st Street. His apartment was just as dark and with as many martinis.

Our life together was domestic, debt-ridden, and perhaps a bit desperate. We played the couples game, with lots of cats, dogs, and some discreet cheating on the side. In conjugally focused 1969, I felt quite old. I was 33.

I felt that I had always been gay, since the beginning of time. Indeed, it seemed to me that men were the natural object of affection, as had been Skipper, who lived across the street from my parents' house in our little downstate town. He was twelve, and I a precocious five or six. I adored him. He used to come over when my parents were away, and we would play--amorously--in an upstairs bedroom. I had no word for it, of course, but I knew what I wanted.

Willing boys were available in grade school, though it was more curious fumbling than fulfillment. And they were there in high school, too. College was no different. At the southern university where I took an M.A., I found myself in the midst of a veritable fraternity of fellow scholars who described themselves as elegant queens and other competing sexual royalty as bitchy ones. By the time I went to New York in 1960 to enter NYU to achieve a Ph.D. in English, I discovered a gay life more glittering and quite beyond what I had thus far known.

Being "single" I hit the bars, which were then a bit secretive and vaguely illegal and generally, as we so inelegantly said, "piss-elegant," and always campy, bitchy, and fun. In New York, I met a number of men, and some stayed on, most for a night, some for a few weeks, some months, some a couple of years. And in New York, I entered into my first long relationship.

My public "gay life" was reasonably un-deceptive. It was just there--no spectable, no triumph, no pain or recrimination. I had no doubt and felt no guilt. I was "out" to everyone who knew, though more by default than declaration. I denied nothing but asserted nothing. After I was hired at City College, I was aware of a distinct though not universal chill of homophobia, yet I brought no fake dates to faculty parties.

We had by then bought a small handful of decaying houses, and one of them, next to us, we sold to three young men. They were gay and lived, the three of them, in a semi-Irish-Italian homosexual menage. They redid the house meticulously: sharp-edged and clean, and turned it into a manicured showplace, solid middle class, gay around the edges.

I envied them. I envied them the solidity, the order, the total neatness of their life. I envied their freedom from debt, their freedom from spontaneity, their freedom from disturbing thoughts. All out of character, one of them was involved in something called GAA, and in our talks over the back fence, he told me about the movement, and the boys. The boys attracted me, and one night I went with him to a meeting. The radical rhetoric and the argumentative liberalism was fiery, if sometimes incoherent and undirected. But I listened, and since my politics were and are left-liberal, I more or less approved. But they were all so young, and so the meeting left me feeling ill at ease, envious, old, and, most of all, left out.

I did not go back to that meeting. But then appeared another group called GLF, even more radical than GAA, who had somehow heard that we had an empty building for rent. In a gesture to support their radical sympathies, I rented it to the Nice Gay Boys, as I liked to call them. They paid their rent more or less on time. None of them was cute, and so I did not attend their meetings, but let them be, and they did the same with me. Thus I did not realize it, but they were contributing to the creation of the Gay Movement of the early sixties.

And so, while gay history was being made in my building a block away, the stirrings of the gay revolution of the sixties passed me by. Instead I collected my rents, fixed my decaying houses, kept up some pretense to scholarship, taught my students, and went to Cherry Grove in the summer, ignoring the slowly widening fissures in my "married" life.

June 1969 (A Homophile Youth Movement flyer)
The nights of Friday, June 27, 1969, and Saturday, June 28, 1969, will go down in history as the first time that thousands of Homosexual men and women went out into the streets to protest the intolerable situation which has existed for years in New York City--namely, the Mafia (or syndicate) control of this city's Gay bars in collusion with certain elements in the Police Department.

Riots on Christopher Street?

When I heard about the riots in front of a bar called Stonewall, to which I'd never been, I did not immediately mark the event as significant--to me. How seldom history really means what we thought it did when we are living it. And so, for me, that long significant weekend passed when gay people were not rioting to protest the Mafia at all.

June 1969 (Howard Smith, The Village Voice)
"Pigs. Faggot. Cops!" Pennies and dimes flew. I stood against the door. A bottle. Another bottle. "Let's get inside. It's safer." We bolt the heavy door. We hear the shattering of windows, followed by what we imagine to be bricks pounding on the door, voices yelling.

When I heard about those riots, it seemed to be news from another world. But as I heard more, I began to be fascinated by the event; I read whatever news I could find and asked friends if they had been there. I visited my Nice Gay Boys from GLF. They set me on the right course. And there it all was.

1969 Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square 
(Lucian Truscott, The Village Voice)
As the patrons trapped inside [the Stonewall] were released one by one, a crowd started to gather on the street. . . . Suddenly the paddy wagon arrived and the mood of the crowd changed. Three of the more blatant queens--in full drag--were loaded inside . . . a cry went up to push the paddy wagon over . . . the next person to come out was a dyke, and she put up a struggle. . . . It was at that moment that the scene became explosive. Limp wrists were forgotten. . . .

I was not at Stonewall when it happened. I threw no stones, chanted no chants. But I could not let Stonewall pass. It would not let me pass. In those days after Stonewall, the seeds of a new awareness were planted and began to flourish, an awareness that would grow full and rich and even militant. And so I proudly marched on June 28, 1970, from Sheridan Square up Sixth Avenue to Central Park in the first Gay Pride Parade ever held in the world, marching, I have to tell you, almost in tears, and with friends as moved as I.

I am American born. My mother from a Pennsylvania farming family that immigrated to what was not yet American nearly three hundred years ago. I am a British citizen, too, that status derived because my father came from England to America to find hope and livelihood. I am also French, in spirit and by approved residency, for I have lived here permanently for a decade, and we have been coming here for forty years.

And because of Stonewall, I have another heritage as ancient and honorable as any my forebears could offer. Indeed, far older, beyond church and state, embracing all nations and creeds; more intimate; deeper in the blood than family name or family pride. Mine.

Because of Stonewall, as a writer, I seek out the history of gay men and women whose lives and acts were long unchronicled, unsung, unknown, and whose days and works are found among all peoples and span all times. In my first book, I called what I sought a "hidden heritage." Over these fifty years, to honor those who fought back at Stonewall, I have continued to chronicle--in novels and in scholarship--that heritage, so as to assure that it is hidden no more.

1970 (Leo Skir in Mademoiselle on the Stonewall riots)
This time, our time had come. We took to the streets . . . and we're not going back to the closet, the back of the bus. . . . Ready or not, baby, here we come! We're freakin' on in.

It is now fifty years since Stonewall. I met Alain in 1977. We have passed through many houses, and now France is home. After thirty American years, living in New York City, and then upstate in Pine Plains, then Chatham, then Hudson, teaching at City College for me and for Alain presiding over his gallery in Hudson, Alain Pioton Antiques, which he opened in 1985, we left Hudson in 2008 and came to live permanently in our house in France. We have a B&B to which guests from many nations come--gay and non-gay--and Americans, too.

Before America did, we were married here when France allowed it. We met when I was young. He younger. On Fire Island, I asked him to dance beneath the glitter ball while Grace Jones sang "I Need a Man." We have been dancing ever since.

After Stonewall, the watchword and the goal was Gay Liberation. Liberated? Yes, liberated. I embrace the world. It is not a cliché. Because of Stonewall, surely one of the most important events in the radical alteration of political and sexual consciousness in American history, LGBTQ+ women and men can seize the day and be who they are, if they are willing to do so. Some still, perhaps, are not yet ready. But the Good News from Stonewall is there, always. It is not fake news. No one--no president, no church, no court, no congress, no hoodlum, no bigot--can censor it now.

It was a long road, and a good one, into my kingdom at last, a road illuminated by that incandescent moment--a riot in front of a bar in Greenwich Village--when everything, simply everything, changed.

1969 (Howard Smith, The Village Voice)
The door is smashed open again. More objects thrown in. . . . By now the mind's eye has forgotten the character of the mob; the sound filtering in doesn't suggest dancing faggots anymore. It sounds like a powerful rage bent on vendetta. It has lasted forty-five minutes.

********

Byrne Fone is Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at the City College of the City University of New York and Visiting Professor of Language and Literature at the University of Paris in 1990. He is the author of several scholarly books, among them The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, A Road to Stonewall: Homosexuality in British and American Literature, Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text, and Hidden Heritage: History and the Gay Imagination. Among his novels is Utopia Falls, a mystery novel set in a small upstate town not unlike Hudson. His book about that city is Historic Hudson: An Architectural Portrait.  

Alain Pioton, born in Bordeaux, founded the Hudson Antiques Center, a multi-dealer shop in Hudson, in 1985, the first antiques gallery in that city. In 1992, he began importing antiques from France for his own gallery, Alain Pioton Antiques. He closed the gallery in 2008. Returning to France, he opened the bed and breakfast Le Domaine de La Millasserie.