Marsha P. Johnson's Legacy

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And why was Sylvia kicked out of her home because she was trans When she was in the fourth grade, her grandmother found her wearing makeup, and Sylvia, obviously still very much a child, was kicked out of the family home for doing that as a boy and forced to go live on the street as a fourth grader some grandm For Sylvia and many others, being a young, homeless queer person meant surviving with whatever you had. Sometimes if it came down to it, making your wayays a child prostitute being preyed upon by pedophiles as Sylvia did Thank you, Grandm If you were really unlucky, living on the street meant a literal lifetime of scrapving by and carrying the physical and psychic scars of that put you in an early grave If you were a little lucky, someone an elder member of the community, perhaps might take you under their wing. They might teach you how to become a drag queen or connect you to work in one of the city's underground gay bars Maybe then you could make enough to rent a room, build a circle of friends, have something resembling stability But even if you did manage that, that stability was very tenuous If you daare to go out of the town, if you want to have if you had the audacity. If want to have a normal social life, like straight people did, you could and often would quickly find yourself at the business end of a nightstick as police forced their way inside the gay bar you had decided to go to. You'll be asked for your ID, lined up and arrested or something as trivial as not acting straight enough, seriously to the mayor's office's liking Drag queens and trans women were especially targeted because their visibility made them easy to charge with violating laws about presenting according to your born gender A woman could be arrested for not wearing three articles of feminine clothing at the same time and easy policing meant better visibility for law enforcement which meant the city government would get props for enforcing, quote, law and order Fucksake It was a biticious cyle And in the middle of the twentieth centy, Sylvia and many others were caught in the middle of it, navigating a world where any response to this mistreatment carried a lot of risk. Step back and your wrist arrest, beatings, and the world getting media confirmation of queer people as violent and unstable in newspaper, newspaper, TV, magazine, and radio reports Stay quiet and you would live another day, but nothing would change. And queer people would continue to be targeted and pushed to the side. So what were queer people supposed to do In the nineteen fifties and sixties, small queer groups like the Madachine Society and the Daughters of Billitus had tried to strike a compromise by between fighting or staying complacent. By organizing marches in Washington DC and Philadelphia, where queer people would proudly hold signs declaring who they were But also expect lawn order and show up in conservative gender appropriate dress for the time. You know, so society didn't unravel and quickly devolve into chaos, you know, it would be You allow a man to wear a dress or a woman to wearg cargo shorts and hot dog prettytty soon the streets are chockk full of demons and babies are being barbecued and roasts on sppitits But the media coverage These early activists hop for did not come And as they tried to figure out a way to make politicians and law enforcement listen, the raids against them and their communities intensify. More arrests, more beatings, more lives ruined by their names being printed in newspapers, leading to firings from jobs and banishment from families And in the midst of this, some decided ability Te to fight back Enough was enough A person can only take so much shit before they feel like they have to strike back. When the police approached the Stonewall inn in the early morning hours of june twenty eighth, nineteen sixty nine, they believed everything would go as planned. Line people up, demand IDs, start making arrests This time That should wouldn't happen. When the police leted a few of the bargoers out into the street, a crowd quickly gathered around them, and very quickly it rapidly outnumbered the cops. They murmured to each other. They' surprised at being raided quickly veering into anger. They asked each other why they were just standing and taking it. Again, why in Sylvia's words? They continued to let themselves be quote pushed around. And then Someone th something cobblestone, a can, a bottle, a penny That exact detail remains unclear Not that it matters. What we do know is that within moments someone else threw something and then someone else after them and then another person and another and another and another. And pretty soon the police had something they had never expected on their hands. Full on fucking riot for queer liberation Don'twall riots right now on this historical and I guess technically true crime, but good righteous crime, pride, power to the people' Edition Time suck This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to Time Suck Happy Monday, happappy Pride. Welcome and welcome back to the cult of the Cious. I'm Dan Cuminens probablybably woke Definitely socially progressive It may be part of a liberal agenda. I can't remember what I agreed to at the last New World Order meeting. And you are listening to Time suck Hail, Nimrod, Hail, Lusfinine, praise be to good boy Jangles and glory be to tririple M I learned so much this week. found this topic very inspiring, very fascinating, and I hope you do as well. Before we get started, a quick note, I will be using the word queer as opposed to gay a lot today, and why is that? Well, because fuck you fuck your family, That's why No, apologies. That certainly wasn't necessary. It didn't make s None is striving for accuracy is the reason. The word gay, typically specific to same gender attraction mainly in reference to men, whereas queer a much broader, more inclusive umbrella term for anyone who is not strictly heterosexual or cisgender. Since language is always evolving, In particular, what is clearly you considered a slur, I didn't want anyone to assign the wrong connotation with my usage of the word queer That said Still might get some other words wrong. But they won't be intentionally used wrong 's get queer and also gain moments and inclusive and really sarcastic and absurd and dark and angry and ridiculous Hail Nimrod And here we go Greenwich Village. Currently one of the most vibrant bustling neighborhoods all New York City filled with high end apartment buildings, brown stone houses, funky little shops elevated restaurants and much, much more It is wildly expensive. As of may twenty twenty six, the average apartment rent in Greenwich Village was three thousand five hundred and fifty eight dollars a month for a studio four thousand three hundred and sixty two dollars for one bedroom five thousand five hundred and twenty six dollars for a two bedroom And just a tick under six thousand five thousand nine hundred nineteen for a three bedroom Holy fuck if you're buying rather than renting One bedroom apartments, you know, go for the medium price of about one point two mill And of course it can go up from there. Quite a lot. I poked around on realaltor d. com found a new construction eight thousand two hundred square foot five bedroom, seven and a half bath townhouse. Perch to top sixteenth fifth Avenue Not sure exactly how many floors up it is. New construction though And do you want to guess what the price is Did you just guess? fifty nine million, nine hundred fifty thousand dollars. fifty grand. fififty grand shy of sixty fucking million with a seventeen thousand dollars a month HOA fee on top of that. So that's cool But you do get twenty four hour access to the building's small gym So kind of balances out. Not everything's that crazy. You can also get a nice little six thousand eight hundred square foot five bedroom townhouse at one hundred fourteen Waverly Place for almost nothing Just twenty two million, eight hundred fifty thousand dollars pocket change, right Unsurprisingly, the village is home to a lot of wealthy people Walking down the street. you're going you're gonna see a lot of AirPod wearing finance fucking dominators. Women in high end athletic wear, totent yoga mats and pilates equipment D drinking a fucking thirty dollarars pressed youth families with more than one full time nanny because you can't just have one full time nanny Like some basic bitch peasant, can youa That's gross But for the purposes of our episode today, the village is and was something besides a playground for the wealthy. alsoso one of the most famous queer neighborhoods in the world If you visit Greenwich Village today, you're probably going to see a lot of rainbow flags flying from apartment balconies, same sex couples holding hands as they walk down the street together, flyers advertising LGBTQIA plus events, meetups, drag shows, bar crals and more However Brenadage Vill Not always this way No queer friendly neighborhood in the US. has ever always been that way because for the overwhelming majority of America's history, Just openly being queer was literally illegal Back in the sixteen hundreds, the village was a lot more country than city, The tobacco farms dotting the landscape I love imagining any part of Manhattan just having a far just does not compute. But there was actually still at least one working farm on Manhattan as recently as nineteen thirty two Interestingly, in sixteen forty four, eleven Dutch African settlers in the area were granted half freedoms after the first black legal protest in America before America was even America, I guess, U USwise. all received parcels of land in what is now Greenwich Village and a big part of it that became known as the land of the Blacks The earliest known reference to the village's name is Greenwich to sixteen ninety six in the will of Yellis Manderville of Greenwich, London in England. h who before relocating to Manhattan. had long resided by another settlement of the same name on Long Island. The village will be first mentioned by name in city records, official documents in seventeen thirteen What is now Greenwich Village was still so rural that in the seventeen hundreds, when malaria, yellow fever, and cholera outbreaks hit the southern tip of New York City known today by some as Fidi I hope I'm saying that right or the financial district, peopleeople who had money fled north to the small countryside known as the Village of Greenwich seeking fresh air and a rural atmosphere And then bit by bited Greenage, you know, got a lot less rural and a bit more New Yorky. By the mid eighteen hundreds Greenich Village was well abished neighborhood the streets lit by gas lamps and dotted with horse stables the haphazard settling of the area made for the neighborhood's charteristic croked zigzagging streets During this time, the village was also home to several notable American writers including Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Ida Tarbell These writers were joined by waves of immigrants from France, Ireland and Italy, pushing out the quote respectable crowd who then settled north near Fifth Avenue in Central Park. This chang in character brought both energy and unrest, as change often does. After the tririangle shirtwaist factory fire on march twenty fifth, nineteen eleven, jumping quite a bit ahead, in which hundreds of women, many of them immigrants, died due to unsafe conditions, the neighborhood was outraged In response, labor and women's rights activists organized marches and demonstrations. That same year, Greenwich Village served as the starting point for the New York City's first women's suffrage parade demonstrating in support of equal voting rights for men and women Larly the village. has a long and notable history regarding the fight for equality sure was not lost on the many artists who would l make their names there like Bob Dylan and Joan Bias Soon after soon excuse me, another community began to take root more visibly in the village's streets and gathering places. queer community, which had been covertly establishing itself in the village for years setetting up early gay bars at places like the Black rabbit loocated at one hundred eighty three Bleeaker Street And the slide at one fifty seven McDougal Street That last one, very famous street in American folk music, by the way In eighteen nineties, the Back Rabbit offered live sex shows as part of his straw closed by the police in eighteen eighteen ninety nine and then reopened Then rated again in nineteen hundred by the Society for the suppuppression of Vice Well that doesn't sound a fun bunch I bet a lot of those dudes would have also been right at home working for a group called the Society of the Killing of Joy The slide was operational around the same time. Didn't last nearly as long. Oping around eighteen eighty nine or eighteen ninety, closing in eighteen ninety two There was a key difference between these early, somewhat openly queer individuals and other waves of minorities while immigrants and women's movements were increasingly able to organize visible public protests No one expected the queer community to ever take to the streets one thing Many queer people simply had zero intention ever coming out at this time They did not want to be branded by their neighbors. They' super smart, highly evolved neighbors as being sinful, deviant, or even demonic They tended to live their lives secretly, slipping out of the homes, they shaarered with their families To get a drink somewhere in a darkened room, dance, maybe even kiss before they had to go back to their quote, unquote, real lives U Even the ones who joined burgeoning gay societies like the Madishine Society, the first to identify gay people as a minority that deserve legal protection typically used fake names when they signed up hoping that would protect them from being out it And so few straight Americans expected the queer community. What to ever emerge is a visible, organized force in the streets which also played into the politicians' expectations that raids upon this group were an easy way to rack up points with homophobic constituents who were almost all constituents for a long, long time And so queer life stayed on the edges of society. Nobody protested or demanded media coverage when a gay bar was raided, or when a gay man's identity was published in the newspaper for his workplace and family to see, or when drag queens or transgender women face brutality at the hands of the police When uprisings did happen which was not often They were covered very briefly and in a sensational tdry way by the media. often describbeed the way the protesestters looked in lurid terms and emphasized their quote abnormal femininity gay men and drag queens or their quote, butch masculinity for lesbian women Much more often, the emphasis was on whether or not any police are straight byystanders were hurt Then That would all change with the Stonewall rightites In nineteen sixty nine, the Stonewall Inn was one of the most popular and few gay bars in New York City. a sei, mafia owned and ran crowded place with no running water behind the bar, drink glasses streaked with grime because of no running water And the early morning hours of Saturday, june twenty eighth, nineteen sixty nine, so really Friday night. A group of police officers entered the stonewall in to again raid it like they had done countless times before The arre they arrested the employees for selling alcohol without a license, roughed up many of its patrons, cleared the bar and in accordance with a supposed New York criminal statute that never actually existed that supposedly authorized the arrest of anyone, not wearing at least three articles of gender appropriate clothing took several people into custody constituteed gender appropriate clothing was entirely subjective, by the way, up to the arresting officers for them to determine A bunch ofking nons Some patrons would be charged with violating an archaic law from eighteen forty five that had declared it a crime to have your, quote, face painted, discolored, covered or concealed or be otherwise disguised while in a road or public highway The state originally intended that law to punish rural Farmers who would take him to dress and like Native Americans to fight off tax collectors Now is being misused to harass homosexuals by sooulist, fearmongering politicians putting on a show for voters The raid that led to the Stonewall riots was the third such raid in Greenwich Village Gay bars in a short period of time. And police that night had no reason to suspect that things would not go smoothly again This time, however, the queer community fought back leading to what some sources have characterized as a two day, three day or even six day battle with police over who could exist in public spaces as they were What were the stonewall riots exactly As you might have guessed from the ambiguous timeline there Not exactly clear If any of us know of the Stonewall ots, it's likely that we've heard of them as the beginning of the gay Lberation movement of the sixties and seventies And we probably imagine it as either an organized protest or as a completely spontaneous expression of pent up frustration, but none of those things are actually true At least rather they're not the full truth For one thing, there were many uprisings that could be classified as riots that had occurred before stonewallet bars, diners, private clubs that were frequently raided by police throughout the twentieth century. Following from that Stonewall was not the first instance of people fighting for gay rights. Indeed, small queer groups like the Madashine Society and the Daughters of Billitus, as I mentioned, had been working for years to get queer people legal protection from harassment Ponunciation note, by the way, if you watch five different videos of people saying daughterss abilitities You'll find five slightly different pronunciations of Billitus since it is an American adaptation of a French work. I chose the one that felll right to me Anway stonewall also was not organized not an organized protest or a spontaneous expression Well nobody had planned to protest the bars raid that night. In fact, nobody knew it was going to be happening except the police There were also members of those various queer organizations who had been waiting for their time to take to the streets and this happened be the right moment There's another big misconception that sits at the heart of the Stonewall rightits Given the somewhat wespread recognition of queer rights today, we probably think of Sunwall as a has a straightforward victory, but that is not true The Stonewall riots were broken up around four AM on both the first and second nights And many of the protesterors actually fled from the police when there was enough force to overwhelm the crowd. Also, that did not mean that it was not a victory Indeed, the very act of standing out on the street and protesting was pretty fucking radical and courageous at a time when many queer people were still actively hiding their identities And the fact that M came back for the next night Drawing an even bigger crowd that the queer community was not going to stand for this kind of oppression any longer. and that they had straight allies on their side But that wasn't the only shift In the immediate aftermath of Stonewall, membership at gay rights organizations surged. and it was that surge that allowed those organizations to keep pressing for acceptance and protection from discrimination So how did all this happen What actually did happen on those nights at the stonewall in. And why is the fact and fiction of the Stonewall riot so difficult to pin down Let's jump into today's time suck timeline to find out all that and so much more Trap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time suck timeline In New York City in the eighteen forties, there were no buses or subways There were no iconic yellow cabs and the sounds of honking horns did not fill street level apartments or echo up to the higher floors above Instead there was something simpler Bs. Dirt roads. you can imagine that, horse drawn carriages Obviously horses to pull those carriages And that is where the story of the Stonewall in really begins The Stonewall Inn is located at fifty one and fifty three Christopher Street in Greenwich Village still there today was not an in when it was first built, but rather a stable cononstructed at the fifty one Christopher Street L in eighteen forty three, then expanded into the adjacent lot three years later At that time between one and two hundred Thousand horses. lived in New Yorkity. Holy shit And that would equate to so much actual shit And in eighteen forty three, some of those horses lived at newly built Jefferson Lvary stables By all accounts, these horses were very well taken care of Especially at a time when farm animals were allowed to roam the streets constantly in the carcasses. Of those who happened to die were often simply left in the streets to rot Not cleaned up until someone just couldn't fucking take the stench and or sight anymore and clean that mess up themselves Indeed the Jefferson horses were well taken care of because they had a very important job They provided literal horsecocks for glory holes. which are just starting to become very popular on the island Now that's not right. But I'm guessing I'm not the only person with a very interesting visual in my head right now. Now these horses We're not just running around sticking their big o old silly old horse cocks into holes for strangers to suck stroke and fuck does sound like a pretty fun job. They were responsible for delivering the finest men's women's fashions. Garments the exclusive Saxon Company store on thirty fourth Street Every day the horses were groomed until their black coats shone, and their hooves were painted black and polished like patent leather shoes Al to reinforce the image of Saxs and compompany as one of New York's most elite stores. Wahiah By the nineteen thirties, cars were much more common than horses in American cities, and horse drawn carriages were quickly being phased out Library stables began to close, and many of the buildings that hous the stables were converted into commercial business spaces That was exactly what happened to the Jefferson liibrary tables The space reopened in nineteen thirty as Bonnie Stonewall T room It also operated as a speak easy during prohibition In nineteen thirty four, shortly after prohibition laws were repealed, Bonnie Stonewall became a more legitimate operation. This time passed, name changed to Bonnie Stonewall Inn known as a respectable cocktail bar and restaurant that hosted weddings, parties and banquets Where did Stonewall? that term come from There's actually no definitive agreed upon answer Possible the inspiration came from a book published in nineteen thirty called The Stone Wall Written by Ruth Fullerfield under the pen name of Mary Castle, The Stonewall was an autobiographical account of her romantic dalliances and relationship with another woman So it seems like the name stonewall could have been a way to send a coded welcome message to other lesbans in the area And in terms of American history, this era Not the worst time Qeer in This era of relative progress had started a few decades back. While the early nineteenth century only criminalized homosexual acts typically as sodomy or crimes against nature, they weren't focused on the actual identity of the person committing them. Be the idea of a know gay or queer person with a fixed sexual identity did not really exist At this time in American mainstream culture. As a result, there was actually little policing of same sex attraction, which got lumped in with other immoral acts like gambling and drinking And as the country started to loosen up on thinking of those things as inherently sinful thanks to a burgeoning nightlife culture Qeer people started to become more visible in public life In late nineteenth century, there was an quote in the late nineteenth century There was an increasingly visible presence of gender non conforming men who were engaged in sexual relationships with other men in major American cities. That's according to Chad Heap, prorofessor of American Studies at George Washington University Despite the presence of social reformers who labeled these men, not kidding as quote, male sex perverts A number of nightcubs and theaters would start featuring stage performances by female impersonators AKA drag queens AKA male sex perverts Can you imagine be friends was somebody who says something like male sex pervert in an actual like disgusted way likeike if I overheard someone saying And I can't even tell you how many male sex perverts I ran into. I would know immediately, oh, that person sucks That's not somethingbody I ever have to waste a fucking single moment of my life, pouring into my precious and unimited time or energy into because they're not worth it These spots frequented by male sex perverts were mainly located in the Levy district on Chicago's south S side Bowy in N York City and other largely working class neighborhoods in American cities. In other words They were what we would consider now to be gars And as it turned out, there were great places for gay people, queer people to socialize, build community, and, I don't know, fucking relax be their true selves These new spaces gave gay people, queer people a chance to get to know each other on their own terms, to become friends, to hook up or date. There was no danger of hitting on somebody who was not into your gender since the assumption was that everyone there was pretty open And it was largely gay. It was largely gay man Most of these establishments located in basements and back rooms of hotels and restaurants. places that would not be so easily detectable to the police Unfortunately, the police of course, would find out and police attention will still come. The rise of gay and queer subcultures, but mostly gay gay at this time also intensified the activities of police departments's vice squads These departments were responsible for ridding their cities of immoral behavior like gambling public intoxication, prostitution. Other acts considered to be corrupt, deviant, otherwise socially unacceptable And now that there were spaces for queer people to congregate, just like casinos, were places for gamblers to congregate That landed queer nightlife squarely in the crosshairs of vice cops As queer patrons and performers became increasingly visible in cities's nightlife, the raids got more targeted, more organized, more violent On the night of february twenty first, nineteen oh three, the morning of february twenty second Police raided the basement of the Ariston bathhouse in New York C located on the corner of fifty fifth Street in Broadway gay men were suspected of socializing. The manager of this space was even as it was rumored, G himself. Oh my heck. They must be stopped. What if they open up a rift in the spaceetime continum and unravel the fabric of the universe with all their same sex sucking and fucking? What if? Six dicks We got into six butttholes. at six AM shharp Would that conjure be Eelzebub During this raid, thirty four men were arrested, sixteen charges of sodomy were leveled in the first anti gay police raid on an establishment in New York City And the trials that followed featured moments of Salem wch trial level absurdity foollowing some excerpts from the archived transcript of the People sus Arthur C. Butts. Oh, yeah, mr. Butts be a huge foal point of the trial Uh, the man you are hearing, uh As the witness is an undercover cop who infiltrated the bathhouse, and he's talking about mr. Butts in this little back and forth I'm going to add a music bed that I feel like the prosecution back then would have found one hundred percent appropriate toonally is thesecor again, prosecutor and that witness out under cover Question. What if anything, did you see this defendant do as you stood there by the door with your back against the westerly wall in this southeasterly room On the night or the morning of the twenty second day of february nineteen oh three Answer He sat up on the side of the couch Who is he the defendant. Call him the defendant, so we will know. The defendant sat up on the side of the couch did it from cop. We right there at the doory entrance The witness indicates pe by it, the black mark being on the side of the doorway the witness complies What if anything, did you see this defendant do as you stood there by the door with your back against the westerly wall in this southeasterly room on the night or morning of the twenty second day of february nineteen oh three He sat up on the side of the couch Who is he The defendant Who if anybody was there on the third couch when the defendant sat up on the second couch and headed towards him? There was a man lying on the third couch Who was that man, if you know I did not know who he was Did you see his face No, sir W this individual that you described as lying on the third couch attired? if you know He was naked with the exception of a sheet How was the sheet placed, if you saw It was hanging around his body. Now, with respect to his hand Well It was up around his neck and town around his body. What did you see this defendant do then Yeah he raised the sheet and threw it up over this man's head and shoulders, covering his head shoulders And he reached his hand over and took hold this man's penis What did he do with a man's penis U He moved his hand up and down He moved his hand up and down. What C On the man's Pen. He had hold of it, and in a little while it was in a state of erection What was U u, the this man's penis And u then he then he put his mouth over it And he moved his head up and down for a few moments, and then he took it out of his mouth and spit on the floor and wiped his mouth at the end of the sheet and laid back on the couch again U What did you do I took a good look at him And I left the room. For fuck' sake, taxpayer money Law enforcement time, rightight manpower spent lurking around at a fucking bathhouse at night, trying to catch dudes jerking and sucking together off So they could arrest him. and then waste even more taxpayer money and officials time an idiotic and explicit trium The government's basic job is to protect its citizenry, right? What is that protecting exactly inststead of ignorant people's feelings Uh, learearn me that Sounds like you guys had a great time in a dark room Around nothing but other dudes. All of whom were gay, by the way, outside of some creepy undercover officers. It's not like those two dudes were out in the middle of a playground doing the shit during recess or doing in the back a pew of a Baptist church on Sunday morning Shit like this is honestly why I have such little respect for laws in general and have never given a single fuck about breaking certain laws Too many loss We're passed by people with too few brain cells. peopleople I definitely do not respect as human beings pect is earned or at least it should be Actions in history like this have one hundred percent eroded, not completely wrote it hundredcent you know eroded to some degree, my respect for the US government and much of its citizenry over the course of doing historical episodes on this podcast The shit is so fucking ignorant And even more than ignorant, it's just embarrassing Epathetic One more section of testimony even more absurd and pathetic than what you just heard. Right after today's first of two Mid Show sponsored breaks. 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That is a conclusion of the witness Judge. Yes, I grant that motion Back to the prosecutor now desescribe how the defendant was wearing this sheet do to say in the manner just describe how it's put on. he had it arerrin so that there was a train that would trail on the floor after him walked around Where was this sheet attached to his body If it was attached Or how was it attached to his body? At that time, he had it around just just wrapped around his body under his arm What was he doing with the sheet trailly behind him, as you have stated? walking around. Dscribe it. talking in in an effeminate manner defense attorney I object to that and asked to have a strick and out Motion granted back to the prosecution Stay what he did. just just walking around How was he walking around? He was imitating the female far as I could see defense. I object and move to strike it out. Judge, motion granted B to the prosecution Describe what you saw this defendant do as he was walking around the cooling room When he would turn around, he would kick the train formed by the sheet around as he as he would turn like with one leg, one foot That's all I seen him do at the time when I first seen him What? That's all I seen him do Remember seeing him do at the time in that room Do you know If any name the defendant was known by there in this Turkish bath establishment was called jected to O objection sustain question again by the prosecution. Did you hear him addressed by any person by any name I did What was that name? The French quQeen the French quu Not some guy walking around in an infinate manner. Being referred to as such, he must be stopped. If we don't all conform to traditional gender norms. Obviously, society will completely and quickly collapse into some kind of mad max form of utter depravity and dystopia. I mean, you know how the saying goes? If we let men prance We all die on the lance r maybe it' If we Let men prance, we all have fun and dance? I can't quite remember Uh in another ridiculous case. that came out of the Eriston Bathhouse raid. The peopleeople versus Crekkel. Pably Craigle Craigel The defense tried to get Andrew Creggl, a tailor who is married with five children found innocent of charges of committing sodomy by bringing in a medical doctor. Dr. Pierre Sieiggelstein. testified that it was literally physically impossible for Andrew to have been standing up, as an undercover witness attested while another man Charles Chamberlain Passionately fucked him in the ass while a third man John Rogers. knelt down in front of Andrew and sucked his dick while he was getting fucking the ass until he came All three men were arrested for committing this act within the hour and charged with I imagine having a great fucking time Holy shit, and hell is beenin The prosecution would bring in another medical doctor and medical expert specializeed in sex crime cases Dr. William Travers Gibb who said that upright anal sex was indeed possible And hot as fuck. He didn't say that last part. But surely someone in the courtroom thought it hy do they put these poor guys through big tabloid covered trials well to humiliate them destroy them socially and financially A of your arrest got back to your family, your employers, anyone else in your social sphere, you could quickly find yourself out of a job unable to get a new job kicked out of your house and in an extremely precarious position overall That's what politicians and cops wanted to make sure happened police would feed the names of the people they had arrested to journalists and their names and home addresses would be printed in the morning paper And then on, anyt timee there was ar raay, press coverage would quickly follow And one article published by the S Fancisco Chronicle, a club that was ridated that was described as, quote, a rendevous for a large number of vicious men. police. Newspaper coverage was an essential part of stamping out the threat of gay life as they sought it. If a closeted gay man heard about the backlash, where other gay men were outed, they wouldd be morely likely to stay in the closet themselves Some of the men who arrested were charged with disorderly conduct or for violating liquor laws, others charged with sodomy And most of those cases were sent to trial trails like the one I just mentioned In the end, while very few men were found guilty, it seems like that wasn't really the point. The point again was to humiliate them And all of the men put on trial were indeed humiliated. And the police did not just stick to raiding bars and bathhouses to find these men. Sometimes the vice squads would use entrapment tactics in order to catch unsuspecting gay men. For example, on january fourteenth, nineteen sixteen, Antonio Bera Vinci went to his job as a bartender at thirty two Sand Street near the Brooklyn Navy Yard He had no idea that before the evening was out, he would be caught up in New York City's early attempts at policing homosexuality At the time, the Navy Yard area was renowned for its lawlessness, and to those in the know, it's gay cruising Sand Street in particular was so infamous that in nineteen thirty two when Charles DemMouth painted an image of a John trying to pick up two sailors there. He simply titled it on that street But Belainci, a thirty four year old, married Italian immigrant, father of five, did not really care about that, it seems. He was just head out to work As he started the shift, a very different organization would start and work of their own The Brooklyn police aided by the committee of the fourteen, civilian anti vice group full of some real peaches, I'm sure getting ready toade thear. The committee of I think I added the word The Committee of fourteen, not the committee of D fourteen which I do think sounds cooler. had been founded back in nineteen oh five by dudes whose daddies did not hung them enough to fight the spread of what was called Rigns laaw hotels bars the rented rooms as a way to get around an eighteen ninety six law that banned any public institution other than a hotel from serving alcohol on Sundays since most men only had Sundays off. They were often forced into go into these bar hotels to hang out, and the committee wanted to put a stop to that. No fucking fun Especially on the Lord's D. U no, sir Sit around to be s Think about all the bad shit that happened to Jesus on Sunday, every Sunday until you die, like he did. God hates fun. Don't you ever fucking forget that?. If you're having fun, you're probably sitting and you're gonna be on fire, literally forever, ' that makes sense For a couple years Uh that was all they focused on. Ending Sunday drinking fun What a noble cost, What a noble pursuit. By nineteen sixteen though The committee had expanded their purview to include all kinds of other fun, I mean ves that took place inside these hybrid saloon bars. Mostly sex work But also any kind of same sex intimacy or any other gender nonconforming behavior or activities They truly hated fun of all sorts. No flirty, no drinking. No No, no tie pants. No un buttoned shirts, no touching, no kissing Definitely no sucking stroking or butt fucking, no, sir. and I bid you good day The committee's primary method of enforcement was to strong arm breweries into canceling the contracts of saloons they disapproved of effffectively shutting them down Since the committee was composed of many high standing businessmen and civic leaders, most brewers did as they requested However when necessary Excuse me, the committee worked directly with the police like they were doing on the night of january fourteenth So why did they target Antonio A Bena Vinci's bar Well, the bar had been on the committee's radar for at least two years after a previous owner had come under scrutiny for allowing gambling on the premises also heard that a lot of jokes were being told to this bar that there was too much laughing, excessive laughing and mirth. Not even a hands shaking that went on was too heartfelt Then in late nineteen fifteen, the police officially put the bar under observation and four weeks before the raid, the officers had noticed that the police was frequented by degenerates Men that were powdered and painted up and their voices feminine Yes, feminine voices, dear God Instead of just barging in, the one hundred forty ninth precinct chose a novel method of investigation. They dressed officer Harry Saunders in U.S. Navy Silors outfits, hot little tight one in order to quote, get the pervert to frequent the place. according to a let written Frederick Witt General Secretary of the Committee of fourteen Now dressed up as a sex little siler boy, Saunders headed in came next was according to his own possibly biased testimony Aarely in the brief fiftyutes he was inside the saloon at thirty two Sands, Saunders was Call by a group of three men stit at a table who called out to him, quote, o, sailor dear Come over and drink with us. Ohh he was lucky. he wasn't held down and fucked. C have died A few minutes after to joining them. One of the men, John Mihan leaned over and said,Qote Wy, you can come over with us We want you to come to one hundred seventy Schmmerhorn Street If you will come down there, we will suck your cock Whoa Those evil fucks wantanted to make him come really hard. E Gad Saunders turned down and turned them down Moved to another table where he said three more men propositioned him What Were these gay dudes like, really horn or something Were they kind of like how Stay dudes We they kind of like how I am I honestly used to wish I was gay, I used to wish I was gay when I was younger So it would have been easier have a lot of illicit sex action with no fear of pregnancy with somebody whose sex drive matched my own. My best friend is gay Dod I went to the Folsom Street fair with years ago when I saw a slow stroke if any old standu fans are listen. And I would be so jealous of some of the stories he would tell, right? He's a horny dude too. And he sometimes would party with other horny dudes, just find himself in a room full of yeses, a bunch of dicks wouldn't want to be stroked But alas, Other cocks just do not get my own cocks motor Revving But also if I had been gay, I am aware that life is far from just nothing but funy games, and that I would have had to deal with a bunch of straight deluded fun killers bullying me and constantly trying to buzz kill my boner barged in. After all these solicitations A few minutes later, Saunders, who had just been saved, and two other officers arrested all six men, as well as Bela Vinci Because according to Saunders, Bela Vinci had heard the proposition and done nothing And that made him guilty of something of running a disorderly house. That's what he was charged and convicted of on february first As result, Bela Vinci was sentenced to three months in a fucking workhouse Insane, tootally insane, which she appealed During the second trial, the three police officers began to elaborate their stories. Now not only had the six men propositioned Officer Saunders, they had rged cheeks when they did some blackened eyebrows and were holding. and I hope you're sitting down Powder puffs Furthermore, officer William Finin claimed that every man in the backroom of the bar was similarly done up, and when they first arrived, quote, twowo sailors were sittit on the laps of two of these men that were arrested Despite testimony to the contrary from three other patrons who claimed there were no sailors sitting on laps, no painted faces or powder puffs. And that there had been no propositioning, the court upheld Benav Vinci's conviction in a three two split so off to the workhouse he went Talk about some dumb shit to go to jail for In nineteen eighteen, two years after Beniminci's arrest, a similar case occurred where a police officer dressed as a sailor had trapped quote, male perverts Mail perverts at a bar at thirty six Myrtle Avenue Wh still judging it a success a successful mission, Frederick Whitton General Secretary of the Committee of fourourteen. begin to worry about this kind of arapment adddding in a handwritten note that using actual sailor uniforms, quote is in flat disregard to a very important federal law ndeed, it is illegal to wear an official US milit uniform of any kind, including a sailor's uniform to impersonate a service member for financial gain or other fraudulent purposes And Whitton was facing another bigger problem as well. The problem was this as Homosexuals We're beginning to be understood as a deviant class of people Now their very existence needed to be policed But laws like disorderly conduct were designed to be brought against activities, not identities This is why the police made such a big deal about powder puffs and makeup because wearing clothing of the opposite gender was an illegal arrestable activity Using sailors to entrap men into unlawful propositions was another way to get around this issue, but as Whitton pointed out, it was a workaround that came with his own problems So what would the solution to these problems be In nineteen twenty three, the New York State legislature created a specific charge of disorderly conduct degeneracy Before that lock Older statutes like sodomy or Cimes againainst Nature were broad and vague. They didn't specifically name homosexuality or even target it as a distinct identity. Instead, they criminalized a wide range of sexual behaviors like oral or anal sex fucking insane that oral sex and oral sex would be outlawed, be illegal. What whether between men and women or between same sex partners Landed the free my fucking ass Uh, land of the bullshit In other words, like we said, the law focused on acts, not identities. And By the way, every other country is the land of bullshit in some way or form. But this new law, penal law, seven hundred twenty two, seection eight, degenerate disorderly conduct, could be interpreted and enforced against anyone who was looked or even seemed gay Once this law was passed, the committee of fourteen, and particular genereral Secretary Wit careful track of how it was being applied In a nineteen twenty five letter to Samuel Bolton, deputy Chief inspector of the Telf Police Division of Manhattan, Whitton wrote that he quote, discovered that in the first four months of nineteen twenty five, there had been some two hundred fifty arrests by members of the Telfth Division of men upon the charge of disorderly conduct degeneracy We call these numbers tremendously startling and wondered whether they represented, quote, an increase of the evil or increased activity by the police against these offenders inccrease of the evil fucking hate that we still have so many idiots like that around today Iignorance has got to be the hardest thing in the world to kill and eradicate Still, overall, these raids did not reflect how the broader culture thought about gay people, queer people, which was not all that bad, all things considered As the U.S. entered an era of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity in the years after World War O, cultural moors loosened and a new spirit of sexual freedom, well relative sexual freedom By the nineteen twenties, gay men had established a presence in Harlem, Greenwich Village, and the cedier sides of Times Square, all the city's first lesbian enclaves, including perhaps Bonnie Stonewall, had appeared in Harlem and in the village though New York City was the epicenter of the so called Handsy craz So derogatory. In fact, gay lesbian and transgender performers graced the stages of nightclubs in cities all over the country The audiences included perhaps surprisingly, many straight men and women eager to experience the culture themselves and enjoy a good party. as well as not surprisingly, ordinary queer Americans seeking to expand their social networks or find romantic or sexual partners At the same time, lesbian and gay characters were being featured in a slew of popular pulp novels, in songs and on Broadway stages, and in Hollywood At least prior to nineteen thirty four, when the motion picture industry began to enforce censorship guidelines via the Hes Code. A N really been the land of the free A good reminder of how social progress is not linear here but rather often, you know, two steps forward, one step back. Or sometimes one step forward, two or three or four steps back Clara Bu's nineteen thirty two film Call Her Savage. featured a short scene with a pair of campy male entertainers singing in a Greenwich village like Nightspot, Little nod. to some in the audience And on the radio songs including Masculine Women, Feminine Men And let's all be fairies popular. So what happened to change things? Well, the pendulum swung back as it seems to always do to some degree With the end of prorohibition, the onset of the Great Depression, the rising tensions have explode onto the international stage in World War II Qeer culture and community began to fall out of favor. Why Well,'s start with the end of prohibition The end of prohibition gave moral crusaders like Fredrick Whitton the chance to sneak in specifically anti queer rules into the newly formed New York State liquor authority Suddenly in nineteen thirty three, while most Americans are down in the depression dumps and angry and hopeless and looking for someone else to knock down a peg or two lower than themselves That old misery Lves company mindset What have been the imprecise and disorganized polication of same sex desire, sometimes focused on illegal activities like drinking or gambling, sometimes focused on sexuality, would become a full scale government apparatus designed to harass and eradicate public gay life So sad. How so in public queer life. So sad how so many of us made sex. When times are tough Find a little release from that discomfort by making the times even tougher for those around them It's like the old terrible adage goes, you know about some dude getting bitched at by his boss at the factory and then he gets home and he hits his wife, and then his wife beats his kid and then his kid kicks the dog New state regulations explicitly prohibiting gay men and women from gathering and licenseed public establishments, right or enforced now or passed. The new regulations not only codify the ban on gay visibility, queer visibility, but raise the stakes for anyone who owned a business and considered bypassing the law since anyone who served a single drink a queer person or made a single film about a queer person, or put on a play with queer characters. could and sometimes did have their businesses destroyed. Go woke, go broke F from a recent threat and logic. or lack of logic, I guess Shitty thought Pg Semon, of course overall aligned in support of these laws. If it hadn't, they wouldn't have been passed pololiticians generally follow the culture's lead, not vice versa. Across the country, many blame the economic downturn of the Great Depression on the atmosphere of cultural experimentation in the nineteen twenties even though they didn't have Fuckle do with the stock market crash You know what? never let the truth get in the way of a good story, right Never let the truth get in the way of what you want to believe As this misguided view became more widespread, darker narratives started to take the forefront, true crime narratives, found in many of the Pulpy Noir magazines we have covered here before Many of these narratives describe sensationalized sex crimes where the villains and perpetrators were gay men The actual true crime stats did not back that up. Heterosexual white men have produced the greatest number of sexually violent crimes pretty much always They did back then, as they still do now for anyone who wants to look into some FBI crime statistics. but again Fuck truth I'm going to believe what I want World War II would also mark a turning point The war called for national strength, reproduction and family structure, military discipline, and eradication of anything that could be considered deviance by moralists To that end, the U.S. military, hoping to screen out mentally ill individuals, asked every potential service member questions on their sexuality Gay, lesbian recruits were now forced to answer questions vaguely or lie about their sexuality in order to be allowed to serve Otherwise, they would run the risk of being sent home and branded as a sex pervert By the middle of the war, the military sought new ways to target and expel homosexuals Instead of charging individuals with sodomy or a court martial defense, the military began identifying suspected homosexuals as Psychopaths. So that's fun In other words, instead of charging service members with the crime of behavior or action, the military chargeed them with, quote, crime of being As the National World War II Museum in New Orleans put it A amazing museum, by the way for military history buffs Such a move, created by an efficient system of discrimination and prosecution of homoseual members of the military And it wasn't like these service members charged with being, you, queer just got to go home, being gay, I guess in this case, serervice members who were persecuted by Section eight blue discharge were purged from bases and units and sent to fucking mental institutions and makeshift quarantine breaks where they routinely suffered physical and psychological abuse, isolation, and humiliation At the same time, the war also unintentionally helped create modern queer communities, though Despite the threat of persecution gay and lesbian serv members thrived during World War two. As with most young soldiers, many had never left their homes before and the war provided them an opportunity to find community experximentation, Camaraderie In some cases, first loves Indeed, serv members on every war frront enjoyed drag show entertainment. An entire gay lexicon was developed and lesbian Lexicon from the writings Dorothy Parker. Eventually an underground queer newspaper emerged. The Myrtle Beach bitch or Myrtle Beach Bell Both names sources give that small circulation, short lived newspaper. shared news and stories between bases and units. In particular, many lesbians in the arrmed forces rose to positions of influence. Women's Army auxiliary Corps member, Phyllis Abri, for instance, was featured in propaganda articles becausecause she was seen to represent the ideals of a WAAC Unknown to the Army, they also selected Arby's lover Mildred as another ideal WAAC to be featured in propaganda But to the rest of the nation, the message was clear Game in particular were a minority that needed to be sequestered pushed into the shadows if they couldn't be outright fucking eliminated like the Nazis were doing with homosexuals and Holocaust This new attitude and atmosphere would make the immediate post warar years in America fucking weird Kind of like shit's fucking weird right in a lot of ways. Though the country emerged victorious from World War two, and everyone was expected to focus on getting back to quote normal, suburban houses, stable marriages, clearly defined gender roles. We saw the war had actually made parts of being queer easier Indeed, thanks to the war, many men and women left behind the restrictions of rural or small town life for the first time, pouring into cities where density and anonymity. made pursuit of same sex relationships more possible than ever growing gay and queer communities were not the only so called problem. The war had made men quote like men Now Those very same men were moving on from military life into suburban domesticity, white collar office work. Some critics worried that American masculinity was becoming bureaucratic passassive and feminized I guess that was like the people saying now were like the equivalent of Fox news pundits back then could most of America's men wind up gay If they did too much paperwork C could sit in a cushy chair in a nice calm office day after day where the heaviest thing you lift as a stapler, makeake a straight man, think stuff like I think I would like a cappuccino. and some cinnamon coffee cake And then you know what else sounds good to sack on Syballs. Yes, first cappuccino, then coffee cake, then balls. And I stroke a cock until it comes on my face U pererhaps has strange atmosphere could have persisted intense, but overall stable But I wouldn't, in part, thanks to the research of O man. In nineteen forty eight, biologist sex researcher Alfred Kinsey published sexual behavior in the Human Male from his research Kenzy concluded that homosexual behavior was not restricted to people who identified as homosexual In fact, thirty seven percent of men he surveyed had enjoyed homosexual activities at least once evenven more just and this is an atmosphere a very pressive atmosphere Even more destabilizing than the number itself is what it implied. The popular assumption in mid century America was that homosexual men were visibly identifiable outsiders, Eeminine, theatrical, obviously different. And you could use those markers of difference to quickly identify and marginalize them Kinsey's finding suggest that many men who outwardly appeared completely conventional veerans, husbands, businessmen, church goers, deep voiced fucking manly ass bears with big pecks, calloused hands, firm jawlines and big o' rockheart cocks, but also maybe sometimes small, not intimidated, but still able to get the job done so don't mock them cocks had engaged in same sex behavior at some point that introduced a new cultural anxiety What if Homosexuality What's invisible? Damn you Satan! What if it existed beneath the surface of ordinary American life Yeah This fear landed in the American Zeitgeist, precise as the Cold War was teaching Americans to fear other hidden enemies Indeed, during the early Cold War, the US became paranoid, maybe even more so than today. Obsessed with infiltration, subversion, secret loyalties long before people were able to channel those fucking weird feelings into places online and overshit like unon Nominally, the fear was about communist infiltration, but as Senator Joseph McCarthy popularized the idea that enemies could look perfectly respectable while secretly undermining the nation from within foocus expanded to include Homosexuality Hiding in plain sight And soon a new narrative developed came in to conceal their identities They could be blackmailed or excuse me, rather if they needed to, if they wanted to conscealer identities. Therefore, homosexuals were deemed to be quote security risks and could not be trusted in government, military or sensitive institutions and to the country at large, homosexuality and communism seemed like they went together hand in hand Both communists and gayen in particular were thought to be morally weak or psychologically disturbed Both were seen as godless. Both purportedly undermined the traditional family. Both assumed to recruit to fucking groom shadowy figures with a secret subculture Unlike communists, however, homosexuals were being uncovered as investigators dug into federal employees' personal lives fact that encourage the feder government to keep digging As a result, more than four thousand three hundred and eighty men and women would be discharged from the military and around five hundred fired from their jobs with the government because they might have been queer. post war DEI purge This would become known as the lavender scare On december fifteenth, nineteen fifty, a Senate report literally titled employment of homosexuals and other sex perverts in government was distributed to members of Congress after the federal government had covertly investigated employees' sexual orientation at the beginning of the Cold War The report stated that since homosexuality was a mental illness, homosexuals quote, constitute security risks to the nation becausecause those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons Other institutions would rally around this belief In April of nineteen fifty two, the Ameran Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disturbance in its first publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. more commonly known as the DSM Following year, President Dwight D. Eisenhower Cck suck by his vice president. No signigned executive order Ten, four fifty. which banned homosexual from federal employment either directly in the government or any of its private or for any of its private contractors. This a logical witch hunt, trrickle down into local governments and law enforcement as well. Police departments expanded surveillance of supposed gay bars, parks where dicks were thought to touch, gathering places where one puss might be fingered by the owner of another puss. The shit spreads Who's going to be left to play with other dicks ust other dicks. Well I'll be gay soon Meanwhile, state governments and city officials strengthen sodomy laws and sexual psychopath statutes while schools and universities dismissed teachers suspected of homosexuality on the grounds that they endangered the children. We must protect the children. They undermine a public morality. No evidence for those assertions existed. But again believe, you know, whatever you you want to believe, right? no matter how dumb it might be. That's part of freedom U media coverage would sensationalize these witch hunts In a barrage of articles, journalists shifted away from using the modest and veiled language they'd used before, and instead used derogatory slurs and sensationalized descriptions of the type of immorality that was taking place across the country For many queer people, these scare tactics Wh they say in the closet to got married to someone they were not attracted to They ruin their lives in addition to their own. They tried to ignore the sense that they were not living life as true versions of themselves I'm strongly assuming the suicide rates for this population soar But other queer people They started to wonder Could it really be that being queer was immoral communist and anti American Or was the public just believing a bunch of bullshit One person who believed in the bullshit version there was Harry Hay Harry was the leftist son of a wealthy conservative family who had dropped out of Stanford University in the nineteen thirties and eventuallyoined the Communist Party Which was also anti gay for the record C cannot only blame religion for homophobia people forget or have never learned that historically atheistic communists around the world and men like Hiller who was deeply anti religious have often been much harsher toward queer populations. Sadly Harry Hay, who was leftist, but not homophobic had never gotten married and had a family before Alfred Kinzy's work led him to question the dominant thinking around same sex desire and he had got married and had a family before His membership in the partarty was important for how he was beginning to think about social change. Despite being anti homosexual, the party was working towards many things Harry did believe in, things like anti discrimination laws in the workplace and guaranteed medical care. For Harry, working with the party was kind of like going to activist school. Taught him everything he needed to know about starting an underground organization One that can improve the lives of everyday people while staying undercover enough to keep its members out of danger. in nineteen fifty Harry and some of his friends, Rudy Gurnrich Roland, Bob Hull and Dale Jennings. It might have been Gunnich I'm gonna to say Rudy Gunrich actually gathered in his living room when Harry's wife and children were about to plot a Qeer revolution Discussing their new group's founding theories. Heay declared that homosexuals were an oppressed cultural minority. a statement no one in the U. S. had articulated yet, at least not to any historians knowledge Their first step to planning this revolution was simple They needed a name for the group came up with the Matoine Society. Before I describe this society, let's take our second and two Mit show sponsor breaks. Parters has your family covered for every summer first. 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Hope you heard some deals that you loved and used our landing codes or landing pages and sponsor codes to get some good savings Now let's hear about the Madachine Society The name was inspired by the medieval Italian Matosinos Troops of truth telling court jesters who traveled from village to village s satirizing everyday life in songs and sketches The Medicine Society would be the first homophile organization, an organization dedicated to the appreciation of homosexuality. For safety, members were discouraged from using the real names on membership lists so they could not be identified by the government. Within the group, nobody could quite figure out how to go about getting the cultural acceptance they want it. How would they get a seat at the table Should they take to the streets Protest stand up for themselves Most of the group's leadership believed that the best thing to do was have its members dress and act conservatively with short hair, jackets and ties and to exhibit restrained behavior. the idea being that mainstream society might be more likely to accept them if they for lack of a better way of describing it behaved well As the group's charter would put it, their aim was to quote, eliminate discrimination Duration prejudice and bigotry and assimilate homosexuals into mainstream society by cultivating the notion of an ethical homosexual culture Not everybody agreed with these tactics though In may of nineteen fifty three, because the group was moving in an even more conservative direction, literally all of the original members resigned. including Harry Hay And the Madachian Society was not the only group experimenting with organizing In many ways, Del Mark Still this line classic lesbian love story They met in nineteen fifty became a couple in nineteen fifty two. bought a house and moved in together on Valentine's Day, february fourteenth, nineteen fifty five Dorable And they truly were adorable if you have ever seen pics or you know, video footage of them they would remain together it for over fifty years until Dell passed away in two thousand eight Back in the nineteen fifties Dellan Phillllis had everything except mainstream acceptance and lesbian friends They knew a gay male couple though, and this couple would introduce them to another lesbian couple. and now Dell and Phyllis thought, why not start a social club Why such a loving harmless thing The first meeting of the daughters of Bilitus, the DOB, was in October of nineteen fifty five. Naming the group inspired by the songs of Bilitis, a collection of lesbian poetry written by a French writer named Pierre Louise It was an obscure name, which was purposeful They'd chosen it because most people would not be able to figure out what it meant. And that was perfect for the group's initial purp to have a social outlet and a place to dance since it was literally illegal for a woman to dance with another woman in public And again Land of the free quickly became clear that the group needed to be more organized, and they elected Dell Martin as president. ill decided that the group should not focus on dancing and it should focus on why the fuck are lesbans not allowed to dance in the first place, Whatever the fuck they want Now the DOB would switch its focus to education teaching people about lesbans ant convining straight audiences that lesbians were not any different than normal people of normal people But it' touch It also meant convincing closeted lesbians that their lives would not be over if they came out. that they were not sinful Dirty. They were not any of the many things they've been told over and over again growing up Until the late nineteen sixties, the daughters of Bilitists and the Madashine Society would be the only major gay and lesbian organizations in the US. They provided support networks, discussion groups where queer people could safely meet and talk about their experiences. They defended people who were arrested because of their sexuality,? It helped them get legal representation. They fought discriminatory policies by employers and government agents aggencies, right? Hil Nimerra, a lot of noble shit But above all, they promoted the idea that homosexuals were a legitimate minority group deserving equal rights and dignity. And that fucking mattered But for many queer people, it did not matter enough. No matter how respectable the movement tried to be, police could still storm into a bar, drag people into the street, arrest them for a bunch of bullshit, like existing as they were, and fuck up their lives So soon, some decided to take matters into their own hands. in May of nineteen fifty n Everything was business as usual at Cooper's Donuts. A diner in L.A Skid Row, where drag queens were known to get together in the early morning hours Eat some delicious treats Fuck on his donuts. Wh can it be good for me and my blood sugar If Cooper's dononuts existed now It was not just a safe place for drag queens, but was also a safe space for raucous gay orgies And they somehow made in sold donoughuts that taste exactly like regular sugary donuts but were somehow zero carb. Oh boy I was strolling in and dodge as many stray dicks as needed. in order to get myself some tasty maple bars, chocolate frosted cake donuts and apple fritters sorry excuse me Wha, whoa who, pardon me. Sorry about that? Wh whoop. Oh, sorry. D didn't mean to step on your foot? Oh, shit that was a dick. Wha. N means grabh, grab. Just grab a d donuts. No,, no extrarosting. Thank you. How damn you guys are athletic. sorry Unlike the two gay bars, it was situated between Heralds and the Waldorf Nobody came to Cooper to do anything even close to aicit. unless by illicit, you mean having way too many carbs right before bed, which is a great way to spike your triglycerides and increase your risk for heart attack F stroke, but not that stroke N not a good stroke. Drag queens and trans women, fresh off work came here to unwind, sip down some wateratered down coffee, smoke some cigarettes Eat a late night, taste y ass snack Hing to pass a few quiet hours before they had to go on to their next task, whatever But on one night in May Sources don't say exactly what night that piece would be shattered when the police burst in Imediately the cops demanded to see everyone's IDs But then thew in Los Angeles stated that if your gender presentation did not match the gender on your ID, if you were trans, even in female clothing, as many of the performers wered, you could be arrested and taken to jail You have the freedom to conform to respect our authority U this time no, when the cops went to make their arrests, there was going to be pushback As the police arrested five patrons, bystanders began to protest They started throwing coffee cups, spoons, whatever else they could get their hands on. In the end as the story goes, some historians question the specifics of all this. The police drove off without the people they had arrested One night Qeer Angelinoos. fought back in one victories like that were extremely rare Across the country, police raids, arrests, harassment remained a fact of daily life for queer communities. Even in cities where queer people supposedly had legal protection, like in San Francisco, where city ordinances allowed queer people to assemble in public places, that safety could disappear overnight As it did in nineteen sixty one, when mayor George Christopher orchestrated a campaign to shut down as many Gays as possible Even in San Francisco queer communities were not safe from local state sanctioned harassment part of this effort at about three fifteen AM. september fourteenth, nineteen sixty one. police raided a one room after hours club called the Tay Bush In. Located on the corner of Taylor and Bush Streets More than two hundred people were packed inside the bar at the time. According to witness, the police let the quote respectable looking people go along with those who had political connections Then they rounded up and arrested the rest And the end one hundred and three people eighty nine men, fourteen women arrested and taken to jail If that wasn' b enough the San Francisco examineran a story listing every one of their names, addresses, and places of employment. Fuck you just like the police told him to do in the instance The mayor's strategy actually in this instance, actually largely backfired. Once that report about how those with political connections were let go, the mayor started looking less like a moral crusader and more like what he actually was just a corrupt fuck headad autocrat Writers of the San Francisco Chronicle, particularly columnist Herb Kaine, would point out the mayayor's hypocrisy and the queer community started to rally The local chapter of the Madoine Society quickly became active in restoring the queer community's right to assemble Mewhile, Jose Sario drag performer at S Francisco's black Cat Night Club decided to run for a seat on the San Fancisco Board of supervisors As the first openly queer candidate running for a public office in the US, a win for Saria was highly unlikely. and in the end, it did not happen, but he did respectably well on election dayay than almost anyone thought he would Thanks to these forms of protests, bystander action and engagement with the wider world of politics, word of organizations like the Madachine Society will start to spread and more people would get involved. And one of those people was Frank Comedy A man now sometimes referred to as the father of America's gay rights movement Like many gayen in the twentieth century on the surface, Frank had lived a quite conventional life Born in nineteen twenty five in New York C to Ash Kenazi Ash Kenazi, I said that right. Ash Kenazi, Jewish parents. Frank sailed through high school and graduated when he was sixteen years old went on to Queen's Cllege to study phys, but his studies were temporarily interrupted when he was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War twoI. After the warard, he returned to Queen's College, graduated in nineteen forty eight with a physics degree, smmart dude. From there, he was on to Harvard University where he would earn both a master's degree and doctorate in astronomy super smart dude After a brief teaching stint at Georgetown University, he was offered a job in nineteen fifty seven by the U.S Army Map Service Everything was going perfectly. He had got his education. He had been a soldier Now he's on to a respectable career until The U.S. Army discovered that Frank Comedy had an arrest record So what happened A few years before he'd applied for the job, Frank had been traveling across country to complete his doctoral research When he was groped, D didn't want to be groped by another man at a San Francisco bus terminal. That's Fully closed. Plain cllothes officers witness the incident and arrested, Cedy for engaging in homosexual behavior Once the US Army found out about this, this groping, they fired comedy and then deciding that wasn't enough, took it a step fur decided to make an example out of him. A nineteen fifty eight comedy was banned from any U.S government employment He appealed the decision, even tried to take it to the Supreme Court, but the decision stuck And he was stunned Frankin worked so hard to finish his education. and now at thirty three years old, his career was over All because of some unwanted attention mind you in a bus terminal and the experience woke him up and radicalized him He knew he was gay. But he also knew that that had nothing to do with his professional life But now that he had found himself boxed out of a legitimate career, well what was he going to do He decided to devote himself to political activism In nineteen sixty, Frank and his friend, Jack Nichols co founded of the Waston DC Chapter of the Medachine Society. Up to this point, the Medachine Society had been pretty secretive, as I mentioned Indeed membership lists were heavily protected. Most people again, did not use their real names they were still trying to figure out how to help people without compromise themselves And that was slow going Frank decided to fuck that Frank Jack and some members of the Daughters of Bllitus began to organize pickets The first of which took place at the White House, in April of nineteen sixty five. very public protest Like the platform of the Madoine Society dictated, they made themselves look, quote, respectable by wearing suits and dresses Even so it was still shocking for many to see queer people out and about, not hide in the shadows, instead proudly declaring that they deserve equal treatment When it came to queer liberation, the movement still had a long, long way to go It was still hard to get widespread support because most gay lesbian people had internalized and negative attitudes from the larger culture Many of them had simply gotten married and hoped the quote strange desires they felt would go away too many people do today Thank you conversion counselors, you mindless Whats Other saw psychiatrists and psychologists hoping that doctors would cure them Sometimes these ended in electroroshock therapy or even lobotomies. Thank you, Qus which left many people with full or partial brain damage. How are these queer societies supposed to combat decades, if not centuries, if not millennia of conditioning? that led to people messing with their fucking brains. How would they convince people that they were not damaged when that was what they've been told their entire lives Meanwhile, by the early nineteen sixties a campaign to rid New York City of gay bars was inull effect by order of mayayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. cononcern about the image of the city and preparation for the nineteen sixty four Worlds Fair The city revoked the liquor licenses of bars undercover police officers or that undercover police officers where they'd worked to entrap many homosexual men, you know previously One store in the New York Post. described in arrest in a gym locker room in a fucking jym locker room where the officer, undercover officer, grabbed a man's crutch Wh moaning And then when a bystander asked if the guy whose crotch had just been grabbed was allright, bystander got arrested by the cock squeezing cop What the fuck Sounds like that officer may have taken that job specifically so he could get his man hands ono mandic as opposed to trying to stop manhs from touching Dick No gaze can hide from New York City's finest NYPD Sergeant John Rock is tough on cck He what are you think you' doing wearing those tight backx shorts in pubvlic these sex little twink You want some attention No're just trying to do my city. ive you some attention I'll find out how straight a gay you are You like that? You like that when I grab your limp couck? Let's see how long it takes for it to get hard when I rub it. When I grope it. Okay, still limp, I see. I'll play you game. How about now I spin on my palm and really lube it up all nice like. Huh? Luck, I still l How about now when I grab your hand? Put it on my already very hard cock? Go ahead, you deviant, your sexy little twink, goo ahead and stuck my cock, I dare you. You like that, don't youa? Even though you're still trying to trick me into hing you straay with that limp, won'tit? All right How I about it now? How about when I start sucking it? H it? You under? Youking it? Ohs a car, don't you? Now start sucking my cock. See if you don't get hot. And when you do get hardot, stick to my ass. Stop jicking me off. See how long it takes me to come be sex little twink No gaze can hide from New York City's finest. NYPD Sergeant John Rock is tough. O cock So that just happened I imagine we might We might Get some interesting emails regarding people trying to explain what kind of podcast they're listening to right there Uh, anyway. Faceel this kind of bullshit The new gay rights organizations, queer rights organizations did not know what to do How are they continue their protests How would they organize them What was the right dayat to protests? How would they organize a bunch of small regional clubs into bigger a bigger cohesive movement After the april seventeenth picket at the White House, Craig Rodwell. owner of the Oscar Wild Memorial bookstore in Greenwich Village, very likely the first queer bookstore in the U.S. Propose the idea of an annual fourourth of July picket spread the words the Daughterssabilist in N Yority and Waston DC chapters of the Madachine Society combined to become a larger umbrella group Under the name East Coast Homophile orrganizations u organizations or echo. would be responsible for organizing annual events that reminded the country that queer communities, specifically gay and lesbian communities primarily had been denied the supposly Ameran rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happppiness those three principles enshrineed the Declation of Indpendence As such, the fourth July protest would be called the Annual Reminders And now their first big protest was on On july fourth, nineteen sixty five, queer activists all adhering to a strict dress code of dresses for women in jackets and ties for men carry their signs and marched on Independence Hall in Philadelphia As radical as the event was, there was almost zero news coverage of the annual reminders And unfortunately, what little coverage existed was negative and sensationalistic Confidential magazine a tabloid stop publication, Ran a story in its october nineteen sixty five issue dismissively titled Hom's on the march. W wasn't exactly the kind of thing that made these groups, which had poured hours into coordinated these marches feel like they were making an impact So, some would think that this kind of action protesting in the streets Wearing your best straight looking clothes was not the right way to get the cops to stop ruining people's lives Then again They also were not willing to riot So what could they do Dick Litch. And Craig Rodwell, Oh, fuck out Rod, Rod and Dick who are the president and vice president of the Madicinee Society of New York. decided to try something new on april twenty first, nineteen sixty six, Dick The fucking' rod man And their friend John Timms, not as good of a name went bar hopping to Greenwich Village The men were excited Via the Medicine Society, they've been able to get the newly elected mayor John Lindseay to end the campaign of police entrapment in New York City. Now they're returning their focus to the State Lquor Authority. Like we covered in the nineteen sixties, the state Lquor Authority, the SLA, had regulations that prohibited bars from serving drinks to people who were known or suspected to be gay lesbians E if a person looked gay lesbian, whatever that fucking means Bars could refuse to serve that refuse to serve that individual And that was exactly what Dick Cg to Rd And John hoped these bars would do. They wanted to be refused service so they could make a formal complaint to the SLA broadcastter message he also invited four newspaper reporters, including Thomas Johnson. fucking Johnson, hell yea. fromr the New York Times and photographer Cck andcock., Fred McDrre. Bont the villageo A firstirst up on their pub crawl was the Ukrainian American Village restaurant This bar had a sign that actually said If you are gay, please go away. whichich of course made them walk right in But the journalist showed up before the men did it accidentally told the bartender about what the group was up to, and the bartender closed for the night. rather than deal with that commotion Fuck that gu The second bar on the list was called DomMs. Oh fuck ye it was. and it had a similar sign. The doms was closed A bartenders probably party with some folks from subs So the group feel like a boom boom boom. So the group decided to go for the biggest bed yet. How were Johnson's housed in a building with a bright orange roof at the intersection of eighth Street and sixth Avenue And after the men were seated, they handed the server a written note that said We are homosexuals We believe that a place of public accommodation has an obligation to serve an orderly person and that we are entitled to service so long as we are orderly Well, the waitress called the manager over and the manager said Go ahead and serve He yeah Technically, this was a victory except the men had hoped that they would be refused sururface their next try Y K Kys an even bigger bust O to the bartender serve them? He gave drinks on the house Fucking love whoever that was. With four bars already attempted, the men were not making progress. They were also getting drunk At this point, their friend Randy Wacker. I mean, Whaker. Randy Wicker join them. and they headed to Julius' bar loocated only about a block from the stonewall in. there had been a raid there a few days before. It seemed like you know, they werere going to be denied service. Just as they had hoped, when Dick announced that they were gay, the bartender put his hand over the glass. he had been about to give them, and the iconic moment was captured by Fred McDirah This evening would become known as the Sipin But the media coverage would not be as positive as they hoped. The New York Times headline about the Sipps would read three devis Invite exclusion by bars my God However, the Medicine Society then challenged the liquor rule in court, and the courts ruled that Gays had a right to peacefully assemble, which undercut the previous SLA contention presence of gay clientele automatically were grounds for charges of operating a disorderly premise With this right established a new era of licensed, legally operating gay bars began. That same year, nineteen sixty six marked a turning point for Bonnie Stonewall, the bar and restaurant that would become known as the Stonewall Inn A fire all but destroyed the property In the aftermath, Tony Laia. Notice Fat Tony purchase the proper In f fact, Tony did a cheap renovation on the property, year later reopened the stone wall in is a gay bar. So who was or so was fat Tony Gay? No, not at least publicly. Cobbin No He was an Italian American mobster Indeed, in those days, the mob had almost complete control over the queer social scene of New York City Did you see that coming Mafiosos had figured out that they could purchase cheap properties in the city, turn them into gay bars, get around state liquor laws by operating as private bottle clubs, AKA organizations where membership was nominally required After all, liquor licenses were expensive and could be revoked if the police discovered you were serving, you know, queer patrons or if you were getting up to any other illegal activities, which the mafia certainly was. In other words, his workaround was a cheap way to set up shop The Mafiosos made money, stayed undercover alongside their patrons, had an excuse not to invest much in the ambience, since after all, they would just be serving queer people To that end, the newly open stonewall end was indeed a fucking dump The glasses were dirty, there was no running water behind the bar, which is why the glasses were dirty. The place abound with safety, health, and fire code violations Not to mention the fact that if you went there, you might find yourself rubbing shoulders with some very dangerous men Wellile Fat Tony owned the bar, the real man behind the operation was Matthew Mattty the Horse Uh, Aanello. the capapo of the Genoveze crime family Matdty De Horse owned most of the underground gay bars and clubs in New York City, and he bribed the NYPD with large payments so that they would leave his establishments alone. For the stonewall in, he paid about two thousand dollars a month A lot of money. now way more back then But even that was not enough to protect them from semi regular raidates. paying for protection but not always getting it Maddie was still making money hand over fist selling alcohol that was stolen or bootlegged re driving up the price of drinks and watering them down The real money came from extortion Ed the Skull Murphy I love how these guys always have fucking nicknames. One of the crew members in the Genovezi Crime family was the ringleader has to have one of the most badass mafy nicknames I've ever heard. A former pro wrestler, the Skull worked elaborate blackmailing schemes on his own customers He would steal patrons' wallets to discover their identities, send his gangster friends to the unsuspecting patron's home, posose in his officers from the police moral squad, and then the officers would keep quiet, they would say, but only for a price This in fact, was how the Stonewall Inn made the big bucks by shamelessly exploiting their own patrons who were doing their best to live in secrecy The scal might have been fueled by some self loathing. To do this. In nineteen seventy eight, he would come out as gay himself And then he would go on to speak publicly about gay rights apologizeed profusely for his role in the hurt he had caused countless men and women D't that com Still, even though it was dangerous Excuse me, the stone wall did offer a place to hang out And to dance. Perhaps the only gay bar in the city that was truly dance cllub. That was valuable As Jerry Hoost, a stonewall patron would describe it, the bar itself was a toilet But it was a refuge. It was a temporary refuge from the street So what would it be like to go in Visitors to the stonewall inn were greeted by a bouncer who would inspect them through a peepole in the door Theillgal drinking age was eighteen, and to avoid unwittingly letting in undercover police, visitors would have to be known by the doorman or simply to quote look gay However, only a few people in full drag were allowed in by the bouncers. Mostly the clientele were gay men, but a few lesbians came to the bar as well Homeless male teens who slept in nearby Christopher Park sometimes try to get in get customers to buy them drinks. As visitors entered the bar, they left their coats at a check in on their left. A set of doors led to the first room where the long black plywood bar would on occasion feature a dressed up dogo dancer Although the bar served a variety of people, this first room was usually crowded with Chino wearing more straight lacace patrons looking to have a drink and chat at the tables lined up along the walls, maybe meet somebody for some romance. Those looking to dance entered a set of side doors that led to a second room, which contained a large dance floor The dance floor was thick with the smell of cheap, popular perfumes, taboo, and ambush perfumes mostly worn by the drag quueens patrons fed quarters into a jukebox usually picking motown or pop songs and they dance freely with same sex partners in the black walled room, which was lit by pulsing gel lights or black lights The regular lights would only come on when the bar was tipped off about an incoming raid. At that, people would stop dancing and separate by a few feet hoping that that would be enough to avoid an arrest for lewd conduct Fuck sake, a bunch of nons Why does some of us do this shit oers I guess a lot of us are fucking miserable? During a typical raid, the lights were turned on and customers were lined up to have their IDs checked Those with identification or dressed in full drag were arrested Others usually allowed to leave. when it came to women, police required that they wore at least three pieces of feminine clothing. otherwise they would be arrested Typically, employees in management of the bars were also arrested and promptly bailed out by Mafia Connections And then when the police left, the night would continue drinks, music, and more dancing Indeed the stone wall was so popular because it was the only bar for gay in New York City where dance was allowed But that also put a target on his back but a target was sort of unavoidable for any place with a queer clientele Even for non drinking establishments like Ge Compton's cafeteria Cafeteria sat in San Francisco's Tnderloin Distict On a block line with bars, cheap residential hotels and other businesses typical of the city's Cedity Rd light district This area is one of the few places in that city where drag queens could live openly and also maybe make some money in a variety of illegal ways like sex work or selling drugs And when they could take a break for a bite to eat and hang out with friends, they inevitably found themselves a compomence, which was open twenty four hours a day Unfortunately, the management atomps did not like this I don know what they expected to happen when they opened a restaurant in a red light district, but okay And employees routinely call the police to clear the place out Thanks to that, drag queens were frequently harassed and arrested, often for violating section two forty. threety five subdivision four of the California Penal Code, quote, being masked or in any manner disguised by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration loiters, remains or congregates in a public place with other persons so masked After the raid, dragqueens would leave Trickle back in and then the cycle would start all over And one morning in August of nineteen sixty six, a Compton's employee called the police to again get the drag queens out This time, though, when the police arrived, an officer grabbed one of the drag queen, she responded by throwing a cup of coffee in his face With that one action, the restaurant erupted into complete pandemonium Patrons through plates, salt and pepper shakers and furniture, smashing the front plate glass window into smithereens. Some drag queens whack police officers with their purses, high heeled shoes or their fists When the police started to make arrests, the fighting spilled out onto the street The drag queens shatered the winds of a police car, lit a newstand on fire, and fought tooth and nail as police tried to load them into paddy wagons The rides continue the next night and into the early morning hours as a large crowd gathered to pick it outside of Comptence By the end of the protest, the newly installed plate glass windows had been shattered again. Fuck them for calling the cops and their own customers This right was not enough to start a social movement though the race went on On New Year's Eve, nineteen sixty seven patrons gather at the Black Cat Tavern. A gay bar in Los Angeles to ring in nineteen sixty eight Moments before the stroke of midnight. The band began to play O Lang S signign And then the room burst into song and cheers. As the seconds tick down to midnight, faces in the room swivel towards each other for a New Year's Eve kiss And then the beating started. Right when the men in the bar began to kiss, undercover LAPD officers pounced. might a fucking bunch of creeps. This time, however, the officers did not stop at arrest. Instead, they beat numerous party goers, including the bartender who had to taken to the hospital for injuries. Fucking bunch assholes. After news, the beatings got out. a local organization called Pride personal rights in defense and education began to organize a series of gay right protests against police brutality Pride was a much more radical group than the Madoine Society But it was it was not as established. and they saw the Black Cat tavern rate as an opportunity expand the young organization's visibility by distributing newsletters. That was how Richard Mitch, o, another dick who used the pseudonym Dick Michaels to protect himself and his friend Bill Rau Leared of the organization, both men were especially interested in the newsletter After joining Pride, Richard and Bill took over the communication side and in September of nineteen sixty seven rebranded it as the Los Angeles Advocate. two years later the newspaper was renamed. the advocate and distributed nationally And today it is one of the most widely read queer magazines in the world Meanwhile, other members of Pride were busy protesting what had happened at the Black Cat, marching, carrying signs and chanting outside establishments where raids had taken place And now the conservative leaning medicine society started to think Did they need to adjust the way they were going about this Was protesting messily better than trying to politely win acceptance anwhile in New York T' attney not a good way. Though mayayor John Lindseay had ended the practice of police entrapment against gay men, his re election campaign in the summer of nineteen sixty nine big year would seen acceleration of raids against gay bars. And why Well, Lindsey hoped he would be seen as a law and order candidate someomeone who could guide New York City to the many turbulent counterculture, social movements of the late sixties Raiding gay bars was an easy way to make it seem like the city was maintaining public order Also an easy way to needlessly be a small minded asshole and bully. In the summer of sixty nine, the gay community we would experience our queer community, experience another different kind of loss, the death of Judy Garland The actress, famous for playing Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, whose lifelong struggle with alcoholism, her unwillingness to give up when her performances were getting panned, when her body was being shamed, when her contracts were being dropped, that had helped make her a gay icon. along with her dramatic flare, emotional depth and spectacular stage presence perfectly into the camp style and exaggerated theatrical aesthetic historically celebrated in queer culture. Judy's funeral would be held on june twenty seventh, and many historical reports suggest it was another flashpoint moment where queer people allowed themselves to be authentic in public as they cried, comforted one another, told stories and sang, And some of them took refuge at the Stonewall Inn When trans activist Sylvia Rivera heard about the funeral happening that day, she became, quote, completely hysterical In her words, she felt that there was no one left to look up to I'm planning to stay home and light some candles as a vigil one of her idols when her friend Tammy Novak called and sounding more stone than usual, as Rivera recalled. begged Rivera to join her his own wall. first we're very worried about whether that would be in good taste. you quickly relented Beauty, a prescription amphetamine diet pill and headed out knowing that her friend and drag mother Martha P. Johnson would likely meet her at the bar at some point that night. As Rivera headed out, Seymour Pine was showing up for his shift as the deputy inspector of the vice and gambling unit of the NYPD sixth precinct located in Greenwich Village Pine found out some interesting information That day, the officers at the sixth precinct had received a tip about a mafia racket involving stolen European bonds. bars and clubs like the Stonewall in We're mixed up in this operation In fact, the stone wall was a front for a wide variety of illegal activities, including money laundering, gambling, drug dealing, processing, stolen goods all of which the police knew about and all of which were crimes that bribes were supposed to cover The bribes did not keep the cops away all the time as I mentioned earlier. In fact, because they knew about this illegal activity, there were often plaincothes officers inside the stone wall And so with that tip in mind, the officers were on the lookout that night T plain clothes women were posing as lesbians, while two plain clothes men Maybe one of them was NYPD Sergeant John Tough on Cck Rock ' pososing as gay men Seymour Pine and his partner, detective Charles Smith, were across the stet from the bar in Christopher Street Park, waiting for the signal from the plain clothes cops that meant it was time to go in The signal never came where the officer is in trou H forgotten what to do Unsure, Pine and Smith decided to go in themselves One twenty AM on june twenty eighth, the officers entered the stone wall in When they went in, they expected the patrons to obediately line up and march out per usual As he entered, Symour Pine gave his normal opening line, Pice. we're taking the place Right on ceue, the music was turned off and the main lights were turned on Aroximately two hundred people were in the bar that night Some of them who knew immediately what was going on, some of them who had never experienced a raid like this before The ones who did not know what was going on stood there confused while the ones who did began to run for the doors and the windows in the bathrooms Please quickly borrow the doors though, trapping everybody inside As Michael Fader, a patron who was there that night remembered Things happened so fast you kind of got caught not knowing All of a sudden there were police there and we were told not we were told to get in lines and to have our identification ready to be led out of the bar And that was exactly what the police expected would happen, but it did not go as planned The women immediately refused to go with the officers, while the male patrons refused to give over their IDs. Not knowing what to do, the police decided to take everybody to the police station Though they would separate those, they suspected of cross dressing first and hard them into the back of the bar That took a little time. and as the process dragged on, the discomfort in the air got thicker and thicker and patrons glimpsed some of the officers groping the lesbians while frisking them those dirty motherfuckers Now things were even more uncomfortable As some of the police continued to frisk and grope patrons, other officers moved to check out the bar's liquor stash The plan was to put the alcohol in the patrol wagons, waiting outside, twenty eight cases of beer in nineteen bottles of hard liquor. The problem was the patrol wagons were not there The police made the bargoers wait for fifteen minutes while they sorted it all out. At this point, some of the people who were not arrested were allowed to leave, and they walked out the front door then they didn't gowh Those patrons stuck around the sidewalk, and a crowd began to gather in front of the stone wall. swelling to about one hundred to one hundred and fifty people More people joined, as police hauled people out to release them, and some of them mock saluted the police now as they were released, drawing laughter and applause from the still growing crowd By the time the first patrol car arrived, the crowd had swelled to at least ten times, the number of people that were inside the bar Officers had to fight through as they began escorting mafia members into the wagon. Next, regular employees were marched into the wagon, but the police had to stop because the first wagon was full and a second still had not arrived. At this point A bystander shouted, Gay power. And someone began singing We shall overcome crowd laugh Though it was clear that they were fucking angry too. For a moment, everything teetered on a needle's edge Would the crowd disband? Would the raid continue as usual As the crowd laughed and grumbled. There there was a wack An officer had shoved a drag queen, who responded by hitting him on the head with her purse As the cop launched at the performer with his club, the crowd started to bom. pennies, then beer bottles were thrown at the wagon as a rumor spread through the crowd that patrons still inside the bar were being beaten And then there was seemingly some confirmation of this rumor As a crowd watched, a lesbian woman was forcibly arrested and handcuffed. She was fighting back, fighting like hell, being hit, then dragged to the front of the stonewall inn, then over to the paddy wagon, and then somehow she escaped The pollease capture her again Now they drigged her back to the paddy wagon. she again fought. She stpped away again This happened according to account several times over the course of about ten minutes. Finally when she screamed that her handcuffs were too tight, an officer clubbed her in the fucking head with his nightstick. So who was this woman Lucafina incarnate, Motherfuckers, Hail Lucafina. Probably We actually don't know her identity for sure. She's known today only as the Stonewall lesbian Some sources think that she was stormy the Ly a well known drag performer who had been born New Orleans to a wealthy white man and his black maid, a woman sometimes referred to as the Rosa Parks of the gay community. And she was still a teenager. Dormy left school to joined the Ringling Brother Circus, where she had jumped horses and rode side saddle. After a couple injuries, she joined a mixed race drag troop Jewel box review, dressed as a man while the others who were all men performed as women The group toured regularly in venues like the Apollo Theatater and Radio City Music Hall. And Stormy was known for her deep voice, jazz inspired rhythm and gentlemanly persona Most though, seem to doubt it was Stormy, who only came forward as a Stonewall lesbian in two thousand eight, thirty nine years after Stonewall. They say that if Stormy had been there, she would have been instantly recognizable as a celebrity back to the moment when the cops were finally dragging her toward the car, this stonewall lesbian. Even though her head was bleeding, the woman, whoever she was, kept fighting Finally, she looked squarely at a bunch of people in the crowd and shouted Why don't you guys do something And the crowd did That was the match lightighten the fuel moment They fucking exploded. Literally, every single person burst into flames and burned down the entire block. No, figuratively People started pulling the cobblestones from around parking meters and trees, throwing them, breaking windows. The people who had been handcuffed and put in the wagon promptly escaped ran off. Some people tried to overturn the fucking police car. In response, the police car sped away, much to the chagrin of Inspector Pine, who urged them to come back quickly All this chaos was drawing more people who yelled to ask what was going on? Someone declared that the bar had been raided because they didn't pay off the cops, referring to the mafia Someone else shouted Let's u let's pay them off As coins, beer cans, glass bottles flew towards the cops, the officers looked around for anything they could use in return and found a construction site a little ways away with a stack of bricks The cops now launched the bricks back of the crowd, managing to disperse some of them But they were outnumbered by somewhere between five and six hundred people now five hundred and six hundred people. Now the cops just decided to grab who they could. One of the people they grabbed was a man named Dave Van Rk. Van Rock was a folk singer, Greenwich Village resident who had participated in the Beatnick rot in Waston Square Park earlier that decade after folk music was banned by the New York City Parks C commission In nineteen sixty nine, Van Ronck lived at one hundred ninety Waverly Place, a block away from the Stonewall Inn, and his apartment was a gathering place for up and coming folk stars like Bob Dylan He has been referred to as the mayor of McDougal Street The night of the Stonewall Inn, the night was raided, Van Ron was at a nearby bar called the Lion's Head Tavern. As he left, he saw the commotion and in his own words I was passing by and saw what was going down. I figured they can't have a riot without me Van Ron was not gay, but he had firsthand experience with police violence Both at the Beatennk Rot and at various anti war demonstrations As far as I was concerned, said Van Ronck Anybody who would stand against the cops was all right with me. and that's why I stayed in Every time he turned around, the cops were pulling some outrage or another Van Ron would be the first of thirteen people arrested that night But for every person the cops arrested, there were dozens more on the streets shouting and throwing things. And without any police cars, it wasn't like the police could take them anywhere So what would the officers do They decided to go back inside the bar with the folks they had arrested For a moment, it seemed like the police made the right call, getting out of the throng for their safety But then the wrider started to come for them, started to break in garbage cans, bottles, rocks, actual garbage, you know, bricks hurled at the building, breaking the windows. Witnesses will later say that so called flame queens, hustlers, gay street kids, the most outcast people in the gay community were the ones responsible for the first volley of projectiles aimed at the building In addition, they pulled a parkking meter from the concrete and used as a batterying ram to break in. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr once wisely said, a riot is the language of the unheard And It is so true. Keep refusing to give people a voice and eventually they will choose violence rather than stay silenced Suddenly there was fire The mob lit garbage on fire, stuffed it through broken windows, filling the dim room with smoke. Police quickly went to grab the fire hose, hoping to douse the fire and repel the protesters, but the hose had no water pressure By this point The crowd was almost inside Fist broke through the plywood coverings in the windows and the police quickly unholstered their pistols, threw open the front door, threatening to shoot if they came any closer As that happened, someone squortted lighter flute into the bar. As it was lit and the police took aim, sirens were heard and fire trucks arrived But the fire trucks weren't the only ones on their way. Reinforcements' arriving for the police too. The Tactical Patrol Force or TPF had been formed in nineteen fifty nine, decade earlier, as an experimental squad mostly contained street crimes like muggs and robberies The NYPD viewed the TPF as part of the city's larger strategic plan to quash the kind of general unrest that sometimes seems endless in a big city. nineteen sixty saw a lot of unrest Not disorganized crime but deliberate protests in the name of civil rights, anti war sentiment. gay rights, queer rights, feminism And the TPF was essentially the ones who dealt with the protesters by any means necessary. In order to qualify for the TPF, officers had to meet very specific standards. For starters, first, They had to be total fucking assholes who did not care about social justice or marginalized communities whatsoever None of that woke DI bullshit. Second, they had to have tiny fucking dicks and the rage that often comes with that Third They had to have very emotionally distant and or physically abusive fathers who never showed them love or fully approved of them no matter what they did for real now They had to be young and tough The average age of TPF officers was twenty four, most of them at least six feet tall Military experience a big plus. in many ways, the TPF was more like a military operation than an ordinary police squad And overwhelmingly, TPF officers were white and conservative, which did not endear them to a politically active community of color in the nineteen sixties And when the TPF arrived at Stonewall, the message was clear. It was time for the protesters to get the fuck out Bob Koher, a gay activist who was walking his dog by the stone wall that night, saw the TPF arrive. He said I've been enough rides to know the fun was over The cops were totally humiliated. This never ever happened. They were angrier than I guess they had ever been because everybody else had rioted. But the fairies were not supposed to riot. No group had ever forced cops to retreat before. so the anger was just enormous. I mean, they wanted to kill When they showed up to the stone wall in, TPF officers were dressed in full on riot gear body shields, night sticks. They began swinging those nightsticks at people, often going for headshots that actually had a name. It was called Braining temporarily stun someone or knock them unconscious which usually entailed concussions, skull fractures, sometimes death Whoever is not knocked unconscious will be quickly arrested With larger numbers now, police detain anyone they could and put them in patrol wagons to go to jail. Though Inspector Pine relater recalled that, quote, fights erupted with the Transvestites, who would not go into the patrol wagon. his recollation recollection was corroborated by another witness, someone across the street who said All I could see about who was fighting was that it was transvestites and they were fighting furiously Good for them Also, a more appropriate term for that is now crossdresser transgender or trans if they actually identify as the other gender As the crowd kept fighting, the NYPD and TPF lined up in a E and began to descend upon the protesterors Usually this would cause riders to retreat. this time they didn't Instead they scattered like mice, avoiding the swing of night sticks. They ran behind the wedge formation and threw bottles, coins, and other objects at the police When the police reversed formation, they found themselves facing multiple kicklines of cross dressers mimicking the rockquettes from radio City Music Hall Seriously I watch some videos from people who are there. This is real. Soophie Evans found the same thing in her research and loud mocking voices to the tune of the old vaudeville song of Tera raw, Boom DiA. which I guess was the then popular how howy duty show theme song And they began to sing We are the stone wall girls. We we our hair in curls. Wh our dungarees above our neellanies No in this case meant feminine, and I didn't have the melody right either. Similar to other slurs like Sissy, often used derogatory One person who was there said the last two lines he and his crew sung were We don't wear underwear to show our p big hair This level of coordinated mockery Fantastic Chef's kiss The fact that the protess were lining up and singing at all was shocking to the police and their surprise gave the riiders the upper hand momentarily. But the TPF was still better organized, stronger, and equipped with real weapons, and they managed to drive them back swinging their nightsticks and scattering the protesterors through the village's maze like streets or today? Craig Rodwell reported watching police chase participants through the crooked streets, only to then see them reappear around the next corner behind the police, chasing them back. Also, members of the mob stopp cars overturning one to block Christopher Street. Nichols and Liz Clark in their column, printed in Screw, declared that massive crowds of angry protesters chaseed the police for blocks screaming, catch them some real scooby doo shit By four AM the streets were mostly clear. people who been in the crowd now gathered on stoopps at Christopher Park, dazed and struggling to comprehend what they hadd just seen, noobody knew what had happened. They couldn't figure out if the pushback against the police had been planned by some group, or if it had been an organic expression of decades of pent up rage as they struggled to figure it out the whole neighborhood was eerily quiet. There was also electricity in the air Thirteen people have been arreed, someome in the crowd have been hospitalized and four police officers have been injured. Almost everything in the stonewall in had been broken floors litted with smashed pay phones, toilets, mirrors, jukebox, cigarette machines. During the day of Saturday, june twenty eighth, people from all over the city, most members of the queer community came to stare at the burned black and stonewall in Graffiti appeared in the walls of the bar, declaring drag power. They invaded our rights, support gay power, legalizeed gay bars along with accusations of police looting and questions as to whether or not the bar would be open that night Seymour Pine for one hoped it would not be He planned to finish the raid of the bar that night, dismantling everything and closing it for good, but that would not happen someomehow the bar did open Uh, the second night, you know, the night after this Despite his busted condition and it drew a fresh crowd of writers Many of them were the same people who had been at the riots the night before. Some of them were known as police provocateurs, curious bystanders, or even tourists All these different kinds of people were amazed by what they saw Men openly embracing other men. womomen openly embracing other women As one witness described it, we were just out We were in the streets Now instead of hundreds thousands of people would allegedly crowd the village's narrow cramp streets, how beautiful The throng surrounded buses and cars harassing the occupants unless they either admitted they were gay or indicated their support for their demonstrators, right? Amitted they were gay or queer. And then Marsha P. Johnson arrived Wh's Marscih very important figure in the history of transgender rights, sometimes known as the Saint of Christopher Street Marsha Born, august twenty fourth, nineteen forty five, in Elizabeth New Jersey, one has seven children Her father, Malcolm Michael Sr, worked at the General Motors Factory Her mother, Alberta Clarborne, cleaned houses for living. Every week her family attendant services at a local African Methodist Episcopal church On the surface, Marcia, her siblings and her parents looked like a typical African American family in the nineteen forties and fifties That wasn until Marcia born Malcolm Michaels Jr. began to wear dresses boys in the neighborhood bullied her relentlessly enough to make Marsha stop wearing girls clothing for a time Adults assumed she was gay. And they made it clear that they did not approve Her mother once said to Marscia that being homosexual was, quote, lower than a doll Marsha finally stopped wearing dress after she was raped by an older boy Also planned to get out and live her life on her own terms as soon as she could After graduating in nineteen sixty three, she promptly left for New York City with fifteen bucks and a bag of clothes In the city, she first began to go by Marscia Actually she initially called herself Black Marscia Then Marsha Pede Johnson after Howard Johnson's restaurant in Timesquare Whenever she was asked what the P stood for, she would reply, He had no mind I Mh it. Finding her new identity was straightforward Marsha knew she wanted to be, had knownince she was a little kid But founding housing was harder. And she was perpetually on the streets, sometimes spending a night or two with her friend, Randy Wicker. Other times she slept under the tables at the flower market at twenty eighth Street money, Marscia started to perform and drag, but that could get expensive quickly So she had to get creative shopping at thriftores, picking up discarded flowers from the flower market to make crowns and garlands, which quickly became her signature look Despite her cheerful appearance Marcia struggled Like many of us, she was complex, not always warm and playful. She struggled with her mental health. was arrested multiple times Would of her suffer from psychotic breaks that required hospitalization throughout her life She's even banned from a number of gay bars throughout the city at one time or another And that brings us to the Stonewall in. Some say Marcia was celebrating her birthday on the first night of the wr, even though her birthday was not for a few months away Was she celebrating something else, maybe the legacy of Judy Garlland What most know is that she threw something Some say it was a shot class. The shot class heard round the world of someone dub it Others say she threw a brick jumped on top of the car But Marha herself would say that she didn't arrive until two AM afterfter the ot was already in full swing On the second night though, she got there early And she started to climb a lamppost with something heavy looking Soon, the crowd got a good look at her. She was holding a heavy bag, leaning over the hood of a police car the windshield shattered Boom, mother fuckers. shots fired In the early morning hours of june twenty ninth, nineteen sixty nine, still the second night of the riot, activists Martha Shelly and Marty Robinson stood made speeches from the front door of the stonewall inn As they spoke, fires burn in garbage cans throughout the neighborhood. More than one hundred police officers from the fifth, sixth and ninth precincts tried to maintain order until the TPF arrived around two AM like the night before. There are more kick lines. As Danny Garvin would observe from his friend's aartment across the street quote I saw a bunch of guys on one side in the cops with their feet spread apart and holding their blly clubs straight out And these queens all of a sudden rolled up their pant legs into knickers and they stood in front of the cops. There must have been about ten cops one way, about twenty queens on the other side They all put their arms around one another, started forming a kick line And the cops just charged with the night sticks and started smacking them in the heads, hittding people, putting them into the cars I just can't even get that sight out of my mind That kick line, which I guess was a spoof on their machismo, making fun of their authority. Yeah, I think that's when I felt rage because people were getting smashed with bats and for what Chick line Yep I still believe, by the way that there are a lot of noble cops out there that when done correctly, law enforcement is truly one of the most noble professions there is And I have the utmost respect for so many law enforcement officers who risk their lives to do so. I haveve personally met or been friends with many But the officers, these kinds of officers. the officers that charge and beat those protesterors at night I hope on some other night, they were the ones getting their asses fucking' beat. I hope they got sent to prison themselves, got fucking brutalized in there With great power comes great responsibility to not be a cunt or at least it should being a crooked cop aboutbout one of the lowest of the low in my opinion The second night, the protesterors were more prepared to fight back. And when police captured a rier, the crowd would surge ahead and pull them away from law enforcement. By four in morning though Things acquired it down once again. byy Monday, june thirtieth, things in Greenwich Village were home Some of that was thanks to some rain that will continue throughout the next day Tuesday When the rain poured down, Craig Rodwell and his partner, Fred Sargeant, took the opportunity to get the word out about what had happened Stonewall, what the community now needed to do Indeed, there have been some press coverage of what had happened, but none of it really discussed the magnitude of the event New York Times ran two stories about the stonewall rides, but both buried deep within their metro section One of them titled Four Paceman Hurt and Village Raid, read Hundreds of youngen went on a rampage in Greenwich Village shortly after three AM yesterday. after a force of plain clothes men raided a bar that the police said was well known for its homosexual clientele. The young men threw bricks bottles, garbage, pennies and a parking meter at the policeman who had a search warrant authorizing them, investigating reports that liquor was sold illegally at the bar. On Monday, june thirtieth, nineteen sixty nine, New York Times printed a follow up story. An blink and you miss it piece of coverage. focused on the routingings of the crowd. From this, it was clear who had the press's sympathy So Craig and Fred decided to go for some DIY press coverage They personally distributed five thousand leaflets that called for queer people to own their own establishments for a boycott of Stonewall and other mafia owned bars and for the public to put pressure on the city government to investigate the raids. fuck ya Everybody in the queer community thought the Stonewall writes was a good thing. T many older, homosexual men, especially many members of the Madachine Society play of violence and ineminate behavior felt embarrassing. after they had worked for years, sometimes even decades to convince people that gays were quote Randy Wicker, who had marched in the first gay picket lines before the White House in nineteen sixty five, said, quote, Screaming queens forming chorus lines and kicking went against everything, that Id wanted people to think about homosexuals. that we were a bunch of drag queens in the village acting disorderly and tacky and cheap On Wednesday, july second, some more media coverage seem to back the Medicine society's view up Sheridan Square is this weekend. wrote reporter Luccian Truscott for the village Voice. L look like something from a William Burrows novel As the sudden spectr of gay power erected its brazen head and spat out of fairy tale, the likes of which the area' never seen The forces of Fagatry spurred by a Friday night raid on one of the city's largest, most popular, and longest lived gay bars, rallied Saturday night in an unprecedented protest against the raid and continued Sunday night to assert presence, possibility and pride Meanwhile, for the New York Daily News, Jerry Lisker wrote Last weekend, the quQueens had turned commando and stood b strap to bra strap against an invasion of the helmeted tactical patrol force Queen power reared its bleach blonde head in revolt. New York City experienced its first homosexual riot Queens, princesses and ladies in waiting began hurling anything they could lay their polished manicured fingernails on Bobby pins, compacts, curlers, lipstick tubes, and other Fem fatau missiles were flying in the direction of the cops. The war was on The lilies of the valley had become carnivorous jungle plants So cool On the day the Village Voice article published, this fucking dismissive piece, a crowd of you know insulting, a crowd of angry protesters marched down Christopher Street to the village voiceicess offices, threatening to fucking burn them down for this shitty hot take on the nature of the writing Once more, the tactical patrol force showed up. A street fight ensued between police and demonstrators, shops were looted by some opportunists, scores of people were injured, and five people were arrested. But still, word was getting out that the queer community was fighting the police and seemingly holding their own Indeed, the mob of people that stormed the village voice now included other protesting groups that had been unsuccessful in their confrontations with the police and wanted to learn the stonewall Rider's techniques. By the end of the confrontation, which lasted about an hour, it was clear that the tides were turning evenven if they weren't turning as fast as some of the protesterors hoped As described by one witness. The word is out Christopher Street shall be liberated But All of this presented a conundrum What's were gay advocacy groups supposed to do now They didn't want to advocate for lawlessness and violence, but at the same time, it was clear that dressing in your Sunday bestest and peacefully protesting on a designated day wasn't getting shited done. That question was particularly relevant to the upcoming weeks july fourth, nineteen sixty nine was supposed to be the next annual reminder Philadelphia, but most activists felt that compared to the Stonewall rites, the annual reminders had run their course weren't that effect They didn't want to wear traditional outfits and pick it quietly. They wanted to stand up for themselves Ultimately leaders decided to go forward with the annual reminder though, and protestterors reluctantly agreed to follow the dress code and remained silent during the picket. mostost protesters Not everybody follow these directives. For a moment, the protest was silent and respectful, just like it always had been But then two women stepped out of the single file line and held hands which was a violation of the Medicine Society's demonstration guidelines. Frank Kamy, again, the man sometimes referred to as the father America's gay rights movement, who has participating was furious. But Craig Rodwell spoke up for the women and encouraged other couples to hold hands too, and soon the whole thing devolved into one big argument That annual reminder got more attention though than the ones that had preceded it As participant Lily Vinense would remember, it was clear that things were changing peopleople who had felt depressed now felt empowered After the march, Craig Rodwell returned to N Yorkity to determ determined, excuse me to change the established quuiet's meek ways of trying to get attention One of his first priorities was planning Christopher Street Liberation Day. and he wanted the Madachine Society to support his new plan. But the Medachine Society didn't exactly know how it was going to navigate the post stonewall world. On july ninth, more than a hundred people showed up to a medicine Society meeting All of them wanted to know How would the group move forward? How would gay rights move forward It's leaders stuck to their old script educate heterosexual people, act respectiveably, their version of what they thought that was, and work towards acceptance, not radicalism the group The majority of the people there Not having that When a madachine officer suggested an amicable and sweet candlelight vigil demonstration, a man in the audience fumed and shouted swweet Bll shit That's the role society has been forcing these queens to play One person proposed the formation of a new group called the Gay Liberation Front And the crowd went nuts That was the death knell for the Madoine Society and it would be their last official meeting in New York The Gay Liberation Front, AKA to GLF take over Unlike the Medican Society, the GLF was not a single issue group In addition to fighting for queer rights, they opposed other social inequities, such as racism, class oppression, sexism, oppression of third worldld countries Many of their members were also active in the anti war movement, and the group actively supported the Black Panther Party. Within six months the Stonewall its, the new GLF activists started a citywide newspaper called day Meanwhile, they also organize dances and clothing drives, but their broad focus on all of society's ills would distract from the core mission of queer liberation For one example, when Bob Kohler, that guy who had been walking his dog past the stonewall in on the night of the ri, asked for clothes and money to help the homeless youth who had participated in the ots, the club's membership did not agree or ask him to write a proposal U to see if it was feasible, they just droned on and on about the downfall of capitalism By the fall of nineteen sixty nine, some GLF members were unhappy with the way that the group was being run. They were trying to do too much shit at once At least four memers Arthur Evans, Jim Ows, Arthur Bell, and Marty Robinson. began talking about breaking away informing, their own group. On december twenty first, nineteen sixty nine, a group of about twenty people met in Arthur Bell's apartment and together they formed the Gay Activist Alliance GAA, which focused solely on gay and lesbian rights Their cononstitution began, we as liberated homosexual activists demand the freedom for expression of our dignity and value as human beings. And this was important because the raids had not stopped after Stonewall While the stone wall in itself was no longer function as a bar, it was up for rent by october nineteen sixty nine, there were always more gay bars to target Indeed, in March of nineteen seventy, Deputy Inspector Semour Pine raided the Zodiac and seventeen Barrel Street bothoth key clubs Barrel Street. Soon after that, the police raided the snake pit. and after hours club with no liquor license and arrested one hundred and sixty seven people there. One of them was Diego Viialz, an Argentinian national so frightened that he might be deported that he might also be outed that he tried to escape the police precinct by jumping out of a two story window And he fell and impaled himself On a fourteen inch spiked fence. Holy shit Miraculously he survived. While he was in the hospital, hundreds of members of the queer community held a death vigil protest outside the hospital Also, GA members organized a march from Christopher Park the sixth precinct in which hundreds of gay men and lesbians and liberal sympathizers peacefully confronted the TPF. They also sponsored a letter writing campaign to Mayor Lindsey, in which the Greenwich Village, Democatic Party and Cgressman Ed Kotch sent please to end raids on gay bars It felt like change, positive change might finally be in the air june twenty eighth, nineteen seventy the first anniversary of the Stonewall rightits To commemorate the events of the previous year, activists especially Craig Rodwell organized Christopher Street Liberation Day, in New York City widely recognized today as The first gay pride March in U. S. history Py fucking c The New York March began on Christopher Street right outside the side of the stone wall inn, and stretched for fifty one blocks to Central Park. Thousands participated, many carrying signs and banners openly identifying themselves as gay or lesbian, including Marcia P. Johnson, who is now a member of both the GLF and the GA. Fuck gab bro. Although organizers only received the parade permits shortly before the march began, participants encountered relatively little resistance from onlookers Times were a changeing One New York Times account noted there was little open animosity and some bystanders applauded when a tall pretty girl carrying a sign, I'm a lesbian walked by Simultaneous marches also took place in Los Angeles and Chicago, signaling the emergence of a coordinated national movement for gay liberation One made up of thousands of collaborating gar rights organizations That was something that Frank Comi had never thought possible. And he slowly realized that it was all thanks to the Stonewall Rides that he had disagreed with so much, you know when they actually happened As he put it, by the time of Stonewall, we had fifty to sixty gay groups in the country a year later. there were at least fifteen hundred by two years later, to the extent that account could even be made. It was twenty five twenty five hundred Similarly, Randy Wicker went back on his previous belief that there was something disgusting or unseemingly about how the Stonewall Rs gn down. later describing his distaste as One of the greatest mistakes of my life Meanwhile, the GA kept working. In nineteen seventy one, therou rented a firehouse in New York Citys Soho neighborhood and that firehouse became the GAA's headquarters. compared to the GLF, the GA used more conventional methods to achieve change. They fought to overturn discriminatory laws. They worked to hold politicians accountable to the queer community However, the GAA, probably best known for what became known as the Zapper A direct confrontation with a public figure regarding queer rights, designed to embarrass a political figure or celebrity and gain media attention One of the GA's early s targeted New York City mayayor John Lindsy, who refused to meet with the GAA and take an active stance on queer rights issues, largely because he feared it would hurt his political career, of course So the GA responded by zapping that motherfucker On open night of the nineteen seventy metetropolitan Opera season Members of the GAA infiltrated the Opera house shouted gay rights chances as Lindsey and his wife entered the building See how effective the GAA was at getting people's attention other gay activist groups began to also use this nonviolent political tactic, queer group toip. Activist Mark Siegel who witnessed the raid and uprising at the Stonewall Inn became known for his television zaps. Some of his targets include the tonight tonight' show, excuse me, sorry, Johny Carson and the Mike Douglas S showow His most famous app place on december eventh, nineteen seventy three on CBS Evening News with Walter Kronheite. Mark and a friend lied their way to the CBS television studio. Wh Walter Kronkei was anchoring the live broadcast, Mark ran in front of the TV camera Holding a big sign that said gays protest CBS prejudice Walter Kronkei kept his composure and later to his credit, met with Mark Siegel and arranged meetings with CBS's top management to discuss news coverage of gay issues and queer issues tell youa And so on may sixth, nineteen seventy four, CBS Eing News and Walter Kronkype broadcast a new segment about gay rights. There were other important zappping sucesses as well thanks to a zap at the American Psychiatric Association Conference in nineteen seventy. In December of ' seventy three, the APA voted unanimously to remove homosexuality as a mental illness classification from the DSM And more change was coming In January of nineteen seventy four, Kathy Kozachenko. Kozenk Excuse me became the first openly homosexual American elected to public office when she won a seat on the Annrbor Michigan City Council Three years later, Harvey Milk, open the gay man, would won a seat on the San Francisco Board of suupervisors He would use his position to introduce legislation that protected gays and lesbians from being fired from their jobs He ran a successful campaign against properate proroposition six an initiative that would have ban gay and lesbian teachers Unfortunately, that would make Harvey a target And on november twenty seventh, nineteen seventy eight, Harvey Milk and Progressive mayor, George Musconi were both assassinated Shockingly, the man charged with the killings was not some wild eyed lunatic, as Time magazine later wrote, but former city supervisor Daniel James White Earlier that month, White had resigned his post on the board of supervisors, citing his inability to support his family on the position's salary of do nine thousand six hundred dollars. Five days later, though, changed his mind wanted job back. Mosconia, a popular progressive mayor, initially agreed, but as it turned out, it' not that easy to rescind a resignation. partarticularly one for public office Mosconi would either have to reappoint White find someone else. And in the meantime, Harvey Milk got involved. The progressive Milk, along with others on the liberal side, lobbied against giving White who was a conservative a seat backack And these voices eventually won the mayor over On november twenty seventh, Mosconi was slated to announce that he was appointing a milk based moderate liberal, Don Haranzy to White's old seat That information made its way back to White Who fucking snapped He arrived at city hall the next morning with a thirty eight caliber revolver. To avoid metal detectors, he snuck it in through the basement window. He then found it, barged into the mayor's office. The two men briefly talked before three shots rang out Moscon's aides assumed it was a car back firing or shot down the street. so no one intervened As White then breezed out of the mayor's office and route to Milk's office Harvey and I see for a minute? White allegedly asked And then after a brief chat, he fired his gun again In the end, White was only convicted on two counts of voluntary manslaughter and his lenient seven years sentence for fuck's sake Birrd S Francis especi members of the city'seer community to riot in May of seventy nine Before moving on to close out this little story, little side quest, some good news, two years after White was paroled for two brazen murders. He murdered himself Wh in general, I do not advocate for suicide in cases where there was such a travy travesty, excuse me of justice as this, I do appreciate an asshole taking himself out when the justice system has failed to do so, Back to queer rights now On may twenty second, nineteen seventy nine, approximately ten thousand people gathered on San Francisco's castro and market streets to commemorate what would have been Milk's forty ninth birthday. That turnout galvanized more people to get involved and on october fourteenth, nineteen seventy nine, an estimated seventy five thousand people came to the national March on Washington for lesbian and gay rights demanding equal civil rights for gay people Ye later, on july eighth, nineteen eighty, they would get what they wanted. On that day, the Democratic Rules Committee officially stated that it would not discriminate against homosexuals as their or at their national convention, which began on august eleventh The Democrats would become the first major political party to endorse a gay rights platform And then various states would follow suit nineteen eighty two, Wisconsin would become the first US state to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. take to the nineteen nineties though, for the federal government to roll back some of that McCarthy era discrimination Finally, in December of ' ninety three, the Department of Defense would prohib the U. S. military from barring applicants from service on sexual orientation Applicants shall not be asked or required to reveal whether they are homosexual stated the new policy, which still forbade applicants from engaging in homosexual acts or from coming out policy would become known as don't ask, donon't tell policy partially rolled back in a way by the Trump administration and their soulless fearmongering and scapegoating othering of transgenders. which has nothing to do with her moral stance and everything to do with political posturing political bullies. Targeting small outsider voting blocks, that'll probably sadly never fully go away In nineteen ninety six, in the case of Romer versus Evans, the United States Supreme Court decided that Colorados secondecond Amendment, which denied gays and lesbians protections against discrimination, was unconstitutional, calling them special rights And we could go back and forth through the slow legislative progress for gay rights in the U. S. literally decades of back and forth. as cases crawleded their way up to the Supreme Court, States passed legislation and then walked it back. and finally, gay marriage was legalized nationwide in twenty fifteen following the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergfell versus Hodges But let's refocus on stonewall What happened to some of the people we've covered today Well, the nineteen seventy three, Craig Rodwell moved the Oscar Wild Memorial Bookhop, out of the tiny storefront at two hundred ninety one Mercer Street to a larger space on the corner of Christopher Street and the Apply named Gay Stre I sold the bookstore. nineteen ninety three, three months before he sadly died of stomach cancer Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop remained open until two thousand nine when it then closed its doors permanently, it had a long run The following year twenty ten, Seymour pine that inspector who led the raid would die at the age ninety one retired from the sixth precinct back in nineteen seventy six. Before he died He apologized to the queer community for leading that raid Bulate than never Frank Cowanany would die in twenty ten at the age eighty six, backack in seventy one, he would become the first openly gay candidate for Congress when he ran for the District of Columbia, although he did not get it I spent much of the following decades challenging the military's ban on gay service members and speaking to closeted service members about the toll that living a fake life had taken on them In nineteen eighty, Camy even helped NSA linguist. Jamie Shumakher become the first openly gay government employee after Schumaker's superiors discovered his sexuality and attempted to persuade him to resign. Finally, on june twenty ninth, two thousand nine, John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management, formally apologized to Cammy on behalf of the U.S government. Barry, who is open the gay himself Presented Camy with the Theodore Roosevelt Award, the OPM's most prestigious awwardard What about Marsha P. Johnson? Well Not good news here. In her later years, Marcia would be widely lauded as the woman who threw the first brick at stonewall. although we now know this is not true, since she didn't show up until well after the throwing started. That probably got confused with her dropping the heavy bag on the police c in the second n of the rights Some historians argue that the growing emphasis on Johnson's role reflected a broader effort to recognize the contributions of transgender people drag qus, homeless youth, and people of color in the uprising. W popular retelling of the Stonewall ris, increasingly centered on white gay men and police conflict alone, figures like Johnson came to symbolize the wider and more diverse and queer community that participated in and shaped the rebellion In any case, post Stonewall, Marcia would join a variety of gay rights organizations who advocated for her when she was arrested at various protests, as I mentioned At The same time, she and Slvia Rivera led a group called Street Transvestites for Gay power Star organized protests, demanding better treatment for transgender people Johnson Rivera even also ran a shelter out of a trailer for about twenty homeless transgender youths supportpping these kids through begging and sometimes sex work Not of the kids themselves And that came to an end when truck drivers removed the trailer accidentally transporting one of these all the way to fucking California in the process Marcia would then work to establish Star House, a version of the program that had actual apartments. But she often, as we mentioned, struggled with her mental illness, mental health excuse me, due in part to her frustration over the unwillingness of the broader queer community to recognize the unique needs of transgender people She would spend most nineteen eighties performing with various theater groups although she was hospitalized frequently for mental health issues And then she disappeared On july second, nineteen ninety two, soon after that year's pride rally Johnon left Randy Wicker's apartment At first Wicker assumed that she hadd left for Los Angeles, which she said she was going to do When he didn't hear from her, he filed a missing persons report or tried to, but the police wouldn't actually let him. Then on july sixth, Mara P. Johnson's body was discovered floating in the Hudson River It was collected by two police boats. which then deposited it on the pavement nearby, where it s remained for a short time some time before being taken by city corner She was only forty six. what happened Did she die by suicide? That's what the police ruled, though her friend and fellow activist Sylvia Rivera would doubt that saying she and Johnson had made a pact to die together when the time came Others thought Johnson may have been suffering from a psychotic break and just tried to swim across a river. Randy Wicker thought his friend was murdered And several other activists would confirm that Marcia had been chased by a group of homophobes onn the night of july fourth. so fucking sad Now let's return to the core topic here. What happened to the stone wall? Well, a gay bar named New Jimmy's. openped to the Stone Wall site in May of nineteen ninety, bearing a plaque commemorating the site's history The next year, new Jimmy's was renamed to Stonewalled in possibly to capitalize on the building's history, but it didn't work Now there were a lot more gay bars in the city and the Stonewall Inn was never busier than fifty or sixty people on the best nights In the late nineties, the space would be renovated, turned into a multi floor nightclub thousand the Stonewall in became a national historic landmark then that didn't help its business much either. Throughout the two thousands, Stonewall's beverage suppliers were busy suing us operators. fewew patrons were showing up And it seemed like the world had moved past the location of the Stonewell Rits The owners couldnot justify paying the monthly rent, which had ballooned to twenty thousand dollars For a few people to walk in, look around and go, huh, cool and then leave. So would the stonewall survive Around two thousand seven, the bar was taken over by businessman, Bill Morgan, Tony de Dico, Kurt Kelly, along with the bar's first lesbian investor, Stacey Lentz and they managed to keep it going The Bar was still not a gay hotspot. But you know, it ran, mostly catater to tourists, city kids, what one source describes as bridge and tunnel gays then came the pandemic With the bar as most public places were closed, it seemed like the Stonewall's days were finally at an end, but luckily, crowdfunding managed to pay the rent while the Stonewall was closed, and the bar reopened in july twenty twenty with a limited capacity Soon a visitor center would go up next door opening just two years ago june twenty eighth, two thousand four or twenty twenty four The stonewall is still open today but still faces challenges like a recent one from the federal government. In February this year, the federal government removed the Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument, replaced it with an American flag. this was in accordance with the Department of of Interior's requirement for federally maintained park to fly only the American flag, the Department's flag and the prisoners of wararfag. The backlash. The Pide flag being removed from the stonewall inn was swift And numerous organizations sue the government. fuck yeah. too restore it And that worked And it went back up April of twenty twenty six Hail Nimrd, some shit is worth fighting for U We can hope that that's the end of it, but it won't be. Igorance and hate will forever have to be fought Right They're never fully eradicated A huge thank you to everyone who did fight a Stonewall and other right or protest or protests or sit ins or sip inss, know, etcetera, for queer, but really just human rights. They say there ain't no rest for the wicked I would argue there's less rest for the good whichich makes it that much more impressive to me when the good continue to stand up and fight And now let's hop on out of that timeline. Good job, soldier. You've made it back Bare Donewall riots h did that story go how you expected to We think a stone wall. If you do think of it, it's criminally undertaught. We often hear the cultural myths that have been repeated so many times. They're almost like facts, you know, Marsha P. Johnson in the first Bick or how it was the very first gay rights protest in the U.S. There's even the myth. That it all started as an outpouring of agony after Judy Garland's funeral. and though that is potentially why some people were at the bar that night That wasn't really a factor in what happened. The mythologizing even leads the average person to think that the protesterors won. that the city was liberated from bar rights. That queer rights and broad acceptance followed immediately afterwards, or that queer community or that the queer community didn't have to deal with more discrimination as time went on. I would say they definitely did, especially during the AIDS epidemic And homophobia has been on the rise again as far right radical Christian nationalism has also risen. So why do all these myths about Stonewall exist? Well, for one thing, there's just not a ton of documentation in an era before cell phone footage and ring cameras, before actual interviews with those who were there you, before they were conducted and posted on places like YouTube All people had to go on was the memories Some saw Stonewall as a riot, others saw it as a revolution, others saw it as a fun night out that happened to take a bad turn Some remembered their friend being there when they weren't. Others later inserted themselves into it. Some figures like the Stonewall lesbian were never conclusively identified, while Marsha P. Johnson took a center stage and later retellings Even though she likely came late very late to the first night In Marcia's case, one of the reasons that her role was exaggerated was because it spoke to how many trans women And drag queens participated that night. That Stonewall was not just about gay liberation, but queer liberation as a whole But the other reason those misconceptions exist might be more fundamental to how the Qeer Rights movement acted in the years afterwards Stonewall was not the first queer rite, but it was the first one to be commemorated in a large scale organized way And instead of turning that commemoration into a sad, solemn observance, activists turned it into something else. A celebration where people danced in the streets, sang and shouted joyfully, and simply were themselves in public To set the blueprint for Pide marches to turn it into a movement, Stonewall had to become a narrative somethingomething that people could understand easily That's why the first brick becomes so important. It gives the protesters a flashpoint moment. A second when everything shattered in the world was born anew. As we know though, wasn' that wasn't really how it happened Stonewall was not an organized protest, nor was it disorganized many activists were there But the people who incited most of the action were the ones who had been mostly left behind by early attempts at organization, those who did not look respectable according to society standards for how men and women should present queer people who were homeless and teenagers In reality, Stonewall was much more complex than its later retellings retty much all historical events And that is why it makes it worth diving into And now after all that information, before jumping into some takeaways, a personal note for this episode tryry to make it through this with dry eyes. we'll see U Burying my uncle Paul Cummins back in nineteen ninety five, when I was a senior in high school, Lifft a big impression on me didn't even get his own tombstone His cremation earurn was buried in his grandmother's plot in Riggins, Idaho by just my father and me No one else was there for it This guy was one of the first babysitters I ever had. He lived with us. My dad and mom and I and then my little sister off and on for a few years when I was Little guy in Anchorage, Alaska Dress me up for Halloween Turn me on to cool music like aha And it was also gay. born to the wrong family to be accepted Son of a Zealot, son of a Pentecostal doomsday hellfire and brimstone pastor and his even more judgmental wife Unaccepted by his parents, unaccepted by most of his brothers outside of my dad, he was an outcast And he fell into hard drug use, fueled by shame and judgment. endnded up living on the street during the height of the aIge crisis, ended up doing sex work Got HIV HIV turned AIDS And this beautiful, funny warm and witty, stylish caring man ended up dying in a San Francisco hospital bed wasted down to nothing A living, barely living skeleton who spent his final days with his mother at his side, his very unsupportive mother who did not nurture him or give him comfort in his final moments, but instead judged him him to repent who he was, to say he wasn't who he was, became so hysterical and harsh with him. She was nearlyicked out of the hospital, should have been kicked out She tormented him until the very end. And how fucking tragic and wildly unnecessary She could have just loved him Everyone could have They could have just loved him They could just let him be who he's born to be. It's so fucking easy to do that to just love people. So fuck her And my grandpa forever for not doing that They embodied that quote of There's no hate like Christian love And I know that a lot of Christians are not like that, but some fucking R. and shame on them. shame on all of them for that I have no tolerance at this point in my life for that kind of hate There's no justification for it. releligious or otherwise Two years ago, I went to service for one of my friends from college, Jose Garcia Toughest kid I kn from those days first a hand up for someone for being bullied Uh dude threw a mean punch, wasn't afraid to get hit either. fucking tough dude strrongest guy I ever worked out with at the gym back then. Straight A student, fununny, easily the most handsome man out of our friend group. We all wanted to be Jose But Jose didn't want to be Jose He came from a deeply Catholic family. came out after college And they were ashamed of him rejected him to some degree Guys looked like a fucking model, made an awesome living in the medical field, lived in New York City, fell into hard, drug use due to self hate more than anything It was just so shocking to so many people He did not return a lot of my final texts to him in his last years cut himself off from a lot of the people who cared about him Righteous a self loathing And then he died by suicide His family could have just loved him could have just accepted him for who he was. It was so fucking easy to do He was such a lovable guy. There's just no need for all this hate You get angry when you see two dudes kissing on a TV or in public, get over it. fuck you. Thank you for letting them love each other Like you want to be loow It makes you uncomfortable, thenen go to therapy, you ignorant fuck And I say that as somebody who was an ignorant fuck Let them love Let the transgender kid feel love. The gay kid, the lesbian kid, the bisexual kid, all the queer kids and queer people They're hurting nothing but the feelings, the fragile feelings and sensibilities of the ignorant Full stop Let me repeat that they are hurting nothing but the fragile feelings and sensibilities of the ignorant One of my best friends is gay partner are some of the best people I know. I truly love them. Vacation with them want to pour into my relationship with both of them so much more And I love them for who they are because they're fucking awesome Smart, strong, hard wororking, silly, caring, empathetic, funny as fuck, compassionate, worldly adventurress And I hate that when we are all out in public together They have to worry about being affectionate. Lindseay and I don't, but they do They don't want to bother anyone Well, I want to bother the people who are bothered by them I want to cave their fucking heads in a moment Just leave them alone You know, it's just so easy to do. Just let them be If they make you uncomfortable It isn't because there's something wrong with them It's because there is something wrong with you My daughter Monroe came to us casually as a lesbian a few years ago. She just graduated high school with honors, by the way, and so proud of her evenven more proud of her for refusing. refusing to be anything other than authentic And I'm so grateful. that I get to be the one who gets to be her dad. Not somebody like my ignorant and small minded and frankly hateful They're both dead and I do not miss them. grandparents on my father's side They would have hurt her so much But me I get the privilege of loving her. And I could not love her more. She is so smart. So evolved So kind and funny and beautiful and fun loving and spontaneous and caring and motivated in so many things And if you want to limit her rights, you are my fucking enemy You are small, you are hateful You are pathetic and sad And she is so much bigger and better and stronger than you. Letter be Love her, love them all. So happy Pride Mth, meetax I have love for you I'm sorry that you were born into a world for the people Who think being strong is based on being scared of others and bullying them Real strength is love I'm sorry for any of you. that didn't have a dad to love you. Like I love Monroe It is certainly not your fault I wish you nothing but the grace toologically unapologetically be who you were born to be And I got a big hug for you when I see you Hail Nimroad And timee now for what I imagine will be wildly antic cllimactic Top five takeaways. Time suck, Top five takeaways Wh, number one In the very early morning hours of june twenty eighth, nineteen sixty nine, the NYPD led by Sergeant John Tup on Cockrock B inspectors see more price descended on the stonewall inn for a routine raid of the Mafia own establishment pololice thought the raid would take place as usual, that everyone at the bar would line up, hand over their IDs, and those arrested would be taken to the police station But that didn't happen. At first, the crowd refused to hand over their ID's, and while police sorted out the confusion and tried to get patrol cars to come to the bar, a crowd gathered outside the stone wall. emotions. got a lot of emotion, of course. When a figure known as the Stonewall lesbian shouted the crowd to do something Bonded in full force throwing stones, cups and pennies of cops forced them back into the stonewall in and even lighting the place on fucking fire Number two, by far the most iconic moment of Stonewall rides where the kick lines Moments at which the TPF, which was basically the NYPD's riot suppressing force, tried to advance on the protesters and found themselves face to face with the Rockette style lineup of drag quings kicking and singing. I fucking love it, so does Lucifinia Th these moments showed that brutal force was being used against people who were just out having a good time celebrating themselves, their identities, their communities And this would be absorbed into the first Pride marches parades which were commemorations of stonewall Number three For years, gay activists a queer activist, did not know how to get their message across to politicians. Was it better to dress conservatively and pick it as the Madachine Society believed Should you educate people like the daughters of Billitus tried to do? After Stonewall, this happened with the gay Liberation Front too, which tried to expand its messaging to fight classism and racism. But ultimately was perhaps too broad When it comes to starting revolution, there are a lot of ideas out there, but ideas may matter less than the day to day realities of the discrimination that minorities face What we can say, though, is that when people get pushed far enough, they will eventually fight back So stop fucking pushing them Number four, the stone wall l is still around today, though it's not really the seedity loccale it was when the mafia ran it. Indeed, the space at fifty one and fifty three Christopher Street has a long and fascinating history Dating back to when it was used as the stables for horses that would make deliveries to Sax Fifth Avenue Later, when cars became more abundant It became Bonnie Stonewall Inn, by all accounts a straight establishment th the name may have been a coded message to lesbians. In recent years, the Stonewall in has faced many challenges, high rents, the pandemic Bllshit with the Pide F flag But it still managed to stick around as an important monument in the history of gay liberation, queer liberation, as a national historic landmark. Number five, new info We talked a bit about how you can see the Pride flag out side Stonewall today, as well as in many other West Village establishments. But do you know who invented the Pride flag? Gilbert Baker, a Kansas native who had served in the military before being dishonorably discharged for his sexuality designed the Pride flag in nineteen seventy eight afterfter Harvey Milk' successful election. Gilbert's friends encourage him to embrace the optimis of of the moment and design a flag for the community, something that would be instantly recognizable and he would Some sources say Harvey Milk asked him to make the flag directly, but that's unclear. Gilbert thought about the design for a while but couldn't come up with anything. Then at a show at the Winterland ballroom, Baker watched the crowd move around him As you put it Dance fused us, magical and cleansing. We were all in a swirl of colors and light. It was like a rainbow. With that idea and a thousand bucks given to him by the Gay Freedom Day Parade Committee, Gilbert created two sixty by thirty foot rainbow flags for the Gay Freedom Day Parade, june twenty fifth, nineteen seventyeen In his view, the colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet represented sexuality, life, healing, the sun, nature, art, harmony, and the spirit respectively After Milk's assassination, Gilbert went into business with Paramount Flag Comany to make sure that Harvey's legacy would not be forgotten The demand was so great that it was impossible for them to make a seven color version of the flag so they settled on the six color version Let's still in use today Time suuck top five takeaways Wh, The Stonewall riots have been sucked You know, I could have stopped down, could have stopp recording When I got emotional, but I wanted to heurt trying to get better at that I do think it's important U than you to the Bad Magic Productions team for all the help in making time suck Thanksks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsy Cumins Thanks to Logan Keith, helping to publish the episode, signigning merch for the store at badmagicproductions dot com Thanks to Sophie for kick ass research Kick ass, even though she had to say goodbye to her long timee fur baby Lila, rest in peace Lilla, Mabel Jjangles fine and protect you. Also, thanks to the all seen eyes moderating the cult of the cururious private Facebook page, the modod squad, making sure disiscord keeps running smooth and everyone over on the T time sucks suburbit and bad magic suburbit And now let's heading over to this week's Time sucker updates Updates. Get your time sucker updates First up, neurodivergent fitness sucker Rin sending a message to Bojanglles at Timesookpodcast dot com But with the subject line of I have the answer you seek d They wrote Hide in When listening to the Black Death episode, I found myself saying, Makes sense to Chloe's behavior Then at the end you revealed she's autistic A yes. It made sense to me because I am diagnosed I'm a diagnosed level one autistic Then you begin to question yourself I'm here to tell you, Dan, questestion no more I know my people. Almost everything you say in your podcast, no matter how unhinged. I find myself saying, Makes sense In fact, although I do not have a podcast, I do teach fitness on an app where I get to ramble on about whatever I want I'm talking jokes, trivia, books history lessons, abstract questions, crime, nerdy facts about anatomy, etcetera basasically onm the fitness version of you I just do it while I'm riding a bike or lifting weights, but with less finesse, I'm sure and cursing So I instantly gravitated to your podcast the first time I heard it I even referred to you when speaking to my husband as the autistic podcast guy who thinks like I do. He nods in recognition Anyway, you are autistic. You're welcome. Now you must choose your favorite spoon and describe it in detail This is a thing I swar, look up if you don't believe I prefer small spoons with a smo smooth handle metal or plastic, never wouldn't gag For forget to five Stars, apologies for the long email and all that jazz don't change because that would mean there is something wrong with us. And there most definitely is I it' beautiful at RYn. Tucker RYn. tck E R. If you want to see the female fitness artist U PS, I was C andlw during the R. Kelly episode. I was working out in my tiny apartment gym that nobody else ever goes to until this fateful day. I had my headphones off and my phone speaker on because it was alone. Right when you started a pen sheets rant Tw guys walked in I had to put down my weight, run to turn my phone off. They stood their eyes wide shocked as they tried to explain it was about R. Kelly and you weren' crazy, nor I, and you were comedian you tell stories. I don't think they bought it They started frequakinging the gym at the same time as me and would always ask what I was listening to and laugh. So thanks for making me the weird gym girl Rin, firstirst off, good on you for making workouts fun Yeah, check it out and for being disciplined enough to be both strong and ripped, well done Yeah, you're beautiful and silly and stay in great shape, and that's inspiring Also, I had never heard of the autism spoon I told Lindsey She asked if I had any spoon preferences and immediately I was like, well, yeah, Id never vocalized it before or thought anything of it. But I have strong preferences about a lot of stuff I just that everybody did? Spoon wise, I strongly prefer a medium sized metal spoon, not too small to not be able to get enough food you know in my mouth with each bite to eat efficiently and take too long, but also not too big because then the middle touches my teeth and I really fucking hate that I also have zero interest in wooden utensils. They are not heavy enough, not balanced, feel too fragile. I they could break and leave splinters in my mouth. I hate the way they feel when they touch my tongue and I don't like the way they look. I like a heavy metal spoon, well balanced onene without too deep of a bowl. Because then it takes too much work to get out to the deepest parts of really viscous foods like Greek yogurt F feels good to sell that Thanks for the unoicial diagnosis. Makes you want to get tested even more someday. Next up, a completely insane German sack, Scott wrote with the subject line of you're wrong, motherfucker to the professor of the peculiar I hope that was enough to intrigue you. That title was enough. It was. Dann, because I have a doozy for you. I've been listening to Time Ssince twenty eighteen, joined the space tririp Tilling ranks last year, and finally excuseing me. Finally routing in with good reason Many before me, I want to say thank you for creating TimeSook first and foremost. I am too a knowowledge vacuum. My family is left me behind at many a museum As I read every sign painfully slowly while they way to the next exit Wait at the exit for me to catch back up haaving this outlet to learn about a plethora of topics I'm genuinely interested in with a fun irreverent twist has been amazing. Well, thank you As for the headline. In episode five hundred seven, the Lost City of Z, you questioned if the accordion has really soothed anybody Well, I can one hundred percent confirm that I can. My wife and I were blessed with our first space Newton March, as a parent yourself. I'm sure you can relate with the sheer desperation you can reach when your newborn baby is in the throowes of a complete meltdown at four AM for an incomprehensible amount of consecutive nights. After about forty minutes of heartbreaking crying, him, not me. I was willing to try anything. And I am not kidding When I say I tried everything, food, different holds, different movements, different outfits, new diaper, lights off, lights on, skin to skin, no effects Someone had tried music Classical, nothing. pop, Nope, country, rock, rap, EDM, lullabies, musical, songs and languages I didn't I don't even speak. Well