I cannot tell you what it does to me to hear "pre-Stonewall". And even in our literature, even in the art, "pre-Stonewall", "post-Stonewall". I wrote three books pre-Stonewall and a dozen more post-Stonewall. There’s no demarcation. Gay history is centuries and centuries from the Romans to the Greeks to Oscar Wilde to all kinds of outrages. And those seem to be put back and "pre-Stonewall" is passive. "Post-Stonewall" is brave and dignified. I actually have heard things like that. I’ve talked, I’ve lectured and I’ve been invited all the way from Harvard to USC. And I talk about what it was like, what we had to survive.A fascinating story emerged on the BBC website this morning - the unearthing of a set of photographs of what appears to be a "gay wedding" from 1957, a time when homosexuality was illegal on both sides of the Atlantic and persecution, bullying and discrimination were not merely rife, but state-sanctioned. Apparently, the photos languished in the archives of a photographic processing store in Philadelphia due to the refusal of a member of staff to process them - and when researchers came across their existence they embarked upon a quest to find any trace of the subjects of the photos (presumably with a view of reuniting them with the by-now-in-their-eighties couple) - visit the Our One Story website for more.
Look, "pre-Stonewall" produced Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Oscar Wilde, and I could go on. "Post-Stonewall" produced Bret Easton Ellis, who jumps out of the closet only now and then and then rushes back in, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, where we’re reduced to clowns for straight people. ...It embarrasses me, it embarrasses me very much because that’s what people expect a gay man to do, to be very precious, and that’s not what we are. A good solid queen I will protect forever, they are heroes. - author John Rechy, interviewed for LA Mag
The story has only now hit the media over here because, of course, being in America, there are plans to make a "reality TV" show out of the quest. Groan. Do people not do documentaries anymore?!
Regardless, the very fact that such a ground-breaking ceremony took place at all in such a repressive era, and that photographic evidence of it survived, is indeed testimony to Mr Rechy's wise words above - there was a whole gay world, filled with rebels and non-conformists, long before the first handbag was thrown fifty years ago in downtown New York...
In addition, there were at least three gay riots before Stonewall, as well as several peaceful demonstrations (one of the riots, in Hollywood, actually started out as a peaceful demonstration, before the LAPD butted in.) There was the Mattachine Society, and several other LGBT organizations, so obviously momentum was brewing. Nevertheless, "gay" didn't become a household word until Stonewall (even among gays--I've just read City of Night, and I think Rechy uses the word maybe only two times in the whole novel.) More importantly, what we now call the LGBTQ+ movement wasn't taken seriously by the media--the US media, anyway-- until Stonewall. I'm writing a novel where I have a character trying to grope to explain why it was Stonewall and not all the earlier attempts, and the best she can come up with is the bar was located in the protest-mad Greenwich Village of 1969, where you had a mimeograph machine on every corner, and THAT kept it alive. Honestly, I don't know.
ReplyDeleteLest we forget, there were also gays in the highest walks of life, and in the highest circles of power. If it's true what they say about James Buchanan and Abe Lincoln, one gay president succeeded another.
Indeed - in the interview to wich I linked, Mr Rechy was asked "What was different about Stonewall?", to which he responded:
Delete"There were a lot of writers in New York. And they all wrote their accounts of it. And so Stonewall has become this landmark, which I think is so, so crippling to our history because it scrubs everything [else] away..."
Jx
PS as for gays in history, where does one begin, and how far back does one need to go? Ancient Greece or Rome? King James I, King William I, Queen Anne? Regency Molly-houses and Victorian cross-dressers?
"Some of my best friends are queer..."It still bothers me when people say that.It's like excusing your racism by saying the black postman is such a nice fellow. And I was really annoyed when census(and other such) forms re-worded their questions and I can no longer fill in my race as "human."
ReplyDeleteIn the 60s, before the word "gay" came to mean homosexual [noun and adjective] there was a popular ice cream (in NZ, at least) called Gaytime. I've often wondered if it was simply re-branded...
...wanders off singing "We're all having a Gaytime, a hip,hippy-hip hooray time..."
Indeed the word "gay" was not common parlance for homosexual over here until at least the hippie generation/Jules & Sandy era, but even more likely it was during the 1970s. The word "queer", however, still makes me bristle - I don't care how many activists claim they're "reclaiming" the word; to me, it's just one in the lexicon of hate words used by queer-bashers, like "batty boy" and "faggot". Jx
DeleteVery brave guys even getting the film developed.
ReplyDeletePs documentaries are still very much a thing - though a bit depressingly dominated by True Crime.
Brave indeed!
DeleteWe are hooked on documentaries - anything with David Attenborough, Lucy Worsley, Bettany Hughes, Alice Roberts, Mary Beard, Simon Schama, Brian Cox and the like, and we're more than happy.
It's the "other side of the coin" that bugs me - all the "fly-on-the-wall", "ordinary people plonked in pseudo-historical situations", "World's worst...", "Britain's most famous..." cod-documentaries that largely sit under the banner of "reality TV" rather than genuinely informative programming. Cheap fodder for the "ten-second-memory" generation.
Jx
Channel 4 still make a good documentary.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, I did see this article on the BBC site, and it did cross my mind that people gay for years, and years and years - a good documentary is well overdue.
Sx
Last time I looked at Channel 4, they were the worst cuplrits for all that cod-documentary malarkey - unless Sex Toy Secrets, Jade: The Reality Star Who Changed Britain or Women Who Kill really count as documentaries? Jx
DeleteI was surprised, but the Jade documentary was good, honestly.
DeleteSx
Oh, yuk. Jade Goody. Racist, uncouth, ignorant - why on earth would I want to see a programme about her? Jx
DeleteTo find out why she was like that?
DeleteSx
If she had any reason to be considered worthy of any kind of interest - if she sang, acted, produced great art or great literature, or made a scientific discovery, for example - maybe. But a person who applied to be on 'Big Brother'? No way. Jx
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