Living Stonewall

I'm Noah Feldman. Welcome to this week's episode, where we're going to talk about the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, an iconic moment in the history of the rights of

gay and lesbian people in the United States. It's also an opportunity for reflecting on the universe that existed at the time of Stonewall, on government surveillance and oppression of gay and lesbian and transgender people, and on the changes that have been wrought over the last half century, both the changes that have made things so much better for many gay and lesbian people and the failures to change that continue to affect many many people in various areas

of our lives. We'll start by hearing from Mark Seagull, a Stonewall veteran from Philadelphia. When I was eighteen. In the nineteen sixties, LGBT people were invisible. We weren't on TV, we weren't on radio. We were there was no such thing as a podcast. So growing up as an eighteen year old in Philadelphia City at one point six million,

I literally thought I was the only gay person there. So, since you knew, you couldn't ask people about who you were, since it was something that was only talked about in whispers about, the only place you could do that was at the library, where you might, if you were lucky, find five books, and each of those books might tell you that you were immoral, illegal, and mentally incompetent. And I didn't feel like that was me, and I wanted

to escape that phil Adelphia invisibility. So I went where I thought there were other gay people at eighteen years old, which was New York. And I moved to New York on May tenth, nineteen sixty nine, a date which I will always remember because to me, that representative freedom and for the first day I could begin to be myself.

When you went to New York at that point, there were no neon signs which said where there's a gay area, because even in New York in nineteen sixty nine, it was illegal to be gay, and gay people could not legally congregate. Gay people could not go into a bar and ask for a drink. A bar that served non homosexuals would lose its liquor license. So one of the few places you could do that in was an illegal bar called the Stonewall. And in the Stonewall you could

be yourself. It was a dingy, illegal bar which served water down drinks, but when you went inside, you could be yourself. And that was the magic of Stonewall. On June twenty eighth, nineteen sixty nine, the first day of the Stonewall Rising, Mark had only been in New York for about seven weeks. In New York at the time, it was relatively a regular thing for the police to

come in and raid the Stonewall. I didn't know that that night because for me eighteen, I had never been in a ray before, and so when the police came in, I was sort of shocked and terrified to be honest. But what usually happened, I found out later, was they would come in, take their corruption money and just leave. But that night was unusual in the fact that they barged him, threw people against the wall, roughed them up a little, hurled every kind of insult you can imagine us,

which we've heard our entire lives. And then what shocked me the most was they went to people who looked like they were prosperous or successful and literally asked them to take out their wallets and took the money from those wallets and put it in their pockets. That I think showed me how little they disregarded us, that we meant nothing to them. This was the police stealing and what are we to do? Call the police? They were

the police. And then slowly but surely they allowed us to leave the bar by guarding us, and we didn't disperse. And the police they got their corruption money, They did what they wanted to do, and they were ready to leave. Every time they opened that door, we wouldn't leave. We eventually started throwing stones, cans, or what anything we could find on the street at those doors, and the police literally were afraid to open the door. They were imprisoned

inside stone wall. It is the first time that we imprisoned our oppressors. That's the reason why it's called a riot, and that's the reason why it's history is for the first time, we fought back as a people. As for me standing there, you know, I felt full of adrenaline. While I was terrified inside the bar, Once I got outside the bar, my attitude, mind, body all changed. It became super charged, full of adrenaline and very joyous. But I was so happy to be fighting back and the

standing up for who I was. And I'm sure everybody who was there felt the same exact way. We were happy. It probably was the happiest riot in the history of American because we were fighting back for the first time. There was just a scene of joy. I'm sure the police didn't feel that way. I think they were terrified. They had never seen anything like that. They'd always thought

they could do whatever they wanted to us. And this went on for hours, and I literally at one point was standing across the street watching the scene in front of me, and I remember thinking that was gonna be what I was gonna do with the rest of my life. And at that time, there was no term called gay activist, so I didn't know what the hell I was going to be. I just knew that's what I was going to do, and I also thought i'd be poor for the rest of my life because getting paid to be

a professional gay activist. If there was no salary attached to it, but it was my passion, then it's my passion now. Mark Seagull went on to become the founder and publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News and the president of the National Gay Newspaper Guild. Another person whose life was deeply affected by Stonewall is Joan Nessel. Joan is a truly fascinating person. Born in nineteen forty, she protested against the activities of the House An American Affairs Committee.

She became an activist, ultimately joining a wide range of lesbian and gay rights groups. She became a writer, a professor. She founded the Lesbian and Herstory Archives, and she has continued to teach and think about questions of liberation and the erotics of desire from the time of Stonewall very much up to the present. She joined us all the way from Australia. Hello, Hi, Joan, Hi, It's Noah Feldman. How are you okay? It's an early dark morning here

in Melvern, Australia. So I hope I have a flow of words. I'm sure you will. Thank you so much for joining us. One of the reasons that we wanted to have this conversation with you is that we're all looking back fifty years later on the Stone Wall uprising and trying to understand its context. It's meaning what it meant to the people who were there in it. And I wonder if you would start by helping us to just set the stage for Greenwich Village in the late

nineteen sixties. As a lesbian person making your way there, what was it like for you? Let me start ten years earlier, because all these beginnings have befos. When I was seventeen, I was just a desiring young woman looking for the lesbian touch, and that's what drove me to follow women who look like lesbians. We're talking nineteen fifty eight, so in Greenwich Village, right down the streets to see where they were going. It was this whole underworld that I was desperate to be a part of. And you

were from the Bronx. So how did you know to go down to Greenite Village. Davian cultures have a way of finding who needs them, and the village was it seems to me. As soon as I knew there was another place outside of the Bronx, was known as a place for queer people. And that I want to say that it was a very real word. That two words freak and queer, which is what end in my head as I entered this world. So I walked into a place. There was a place called the Sea Colony and it

became part of me for ten years. So yeah, the Sea Connie was also in the West Village, just a short walk from from where where the stonewall in is. Yes, tell us about the Sea Connie. So all our bars were policed and we were criminals a minute we entered that those doors. So one way there was things called the vice Squad, and the vice Squad patrolled queer i'll use meeting places. And one way they did it was

there was a phenomena called the bathroom line. And what this was There was a line for all these lesbian women drinking a lot of beer, you know, to go to the bathroom, as simple as that. But because we were considered criminal, our bathroom habits had to be policed, meaning only one woman at a time was allowed into the bathroom and to control that behavior. Now, this is all done from the bar owners cooperating with the Vice

squad police. So they could keep the bar open. There was a butch woman that i've whose job it was to give us our allotted amount of toilet paper. And why I understand the why the one person why the allotment of toilet paper, because that was the way to control You couldn't get past her us to inform us that our behavior was being watched and being controlled. So it became part of our I called it a line act. We flirted on that line. We knew it awaited all

of us. I had a double consciousness on that line, and maybe many others did two that this was the state and the state intruded on us. Is also part of the Stonewall time was that we knew and we dressed to go to the bar, that we had to put on three pieces of women's clothing or we could be arrested for transvestism. We couldn't. We weren't allowed to dance, we would be arrested for indecent behavior. So the line was part of it. It lived in my mind as

the powers of the state to control our bodies. So part of the Stone Wall story is desire, and that often does not get talked about. It's what propelled me to take on the state. In those bars, every Saturday night, the police, the same cop would come in. We were allowed to dance in a small back room. The front room was for straight people who wanted to come and

look at the queers, and they'd sit at tables. But the back room was where we could dance women together, and it had a red light, and that was our wanting to sit down and not touch each other because the police, the same cop was coming in for his payoffs, and he'd come into the back room. He'd look us over. He had a wad of bills in his hand, and invariably he would pick some butchwoman who was with a very attractive fam that would enrage them and humiliate her.

I witnessed one night when a butcheroman was thrown up against the wall of the sea colony outside, and this cop made her tack her pinstone to show her that she wasn't really a man. You describe a very movingly the dance of desire and then the constant surveillance of the state, And you also spoke very convincingly about the thought that this was going to break, that there would

be resistance. Can you describe to us what it was like when you you were outside the Sea Colony, you heard that something had happened the day before at Stonewall. You you went down to Waverley Place, What did you see? What was the scene? Like, Yes, I'm walking from my um my tenement apartment apartment from the East Village to the West Village to get to my bar the Sea Colony. It's warm. I always remember the heat, like the heat of the body, but this was the heat of us

the night. And as we approached um where Stonewall was, and it was it's a big thoroughfare, everything changed. It was like I've never been in a moment of of of conflict, of you know, armed conflict, but that's what it seemed like. There were flashing lights, and there were um people felt like hundreds of people just running and milling around, and there were shouts of resistance, and there was energy and there, but there was also fear because

I wasn't quite sure what was happening. And for a minute, I just stood there. I just stood and took it all in and I knew something was changing. And what I saw in the street that night, the second night after Stonewall, was the power of a people's descent the refusal to allow their bodies to be policed without respect for their being, all their desire. And I keep emphasizing sexuality.

That was what drove me, as a seventeen year old into a policed place, knowing that I was I could be arrested any minute for doing a simple thing like touching another woman. But I wanted to be where my body, as any young person, could experience its own erotics. And so that was a public face of a humiliated erotics. I would say that was in the street that night. And then also it was also the courage of those

who had the least doing the most. And this is what struck me in my own boss because my bar was a working class bar, and I say it became our community. We go there every weekend, so we knew everybody, and we probably it was the one place we all met. So there were passing women, women who others thought were men, who worked as taxi drivers, worked at stock clerks who did the things at men usually kinds of jobs. There were sex workers. It was a huge meeting place of pariahs.

Is the word, and that is the word that has been haunting me both. You know, I'm a working class girl who lived on ideas and Hannah Arrant's idea of the pariet. I think that's part of what's happened at Stonewall. It's when the pariats taking everything with pride that made them and also what the society has judged, and doing something different with that heritage. And there was an exuberance. There's an exuberance once without nothing, you make love in

the face of the state. And do you think that do you think that that that mode of resistance that you're describing gave a certain strength or a certain beauty, or a certain form of resistance that's actually difficult for later generations to recapture or to reimagine, because you know, for later generations there's of course still a homophobia, they're still biased, they're still transphobia. None of those things has disappeared.

But typically, and certainly in Greenwich Village, but typically elsewhere in the United States too, it's less likely that the state would be the primary source of surveillance, less likely that the state would be the primary source of force or violence. So there's been in that degree something some things have begun to change significantly. I speak a lot with young people and they ask me the same question. All they used to and they learned, and they say, oh,

I wish i'd come out when you did. It was so you know, you had to. It was so exciting. And I look at them, I say, don't you worry. Your times will give you your stonewall. And that is happening. My main concern is the rise of the fascistic right. These privileges that we're given, all these so called recognitions, one can be taken back very quickly, as Trump and his ilk unraveled democratic institutions. But look look at the contrast. I'm so in ninety fifty, yet I'm in a bar

where every part of me is policed. But I felt so alive. I knew, I knew I wasn't going to take that. I knew nothing they could offer me was worth the culture we were creating under such dorists. And now, in one of the most obscene political moments in American history, queer people are being in a way celebrated. New York is flowing with queer love, and that's wonderful in some ways. And I see how it moves the young people, and I see all of that, But the larger context, the

Force movement the shutting of doors to migrants. This is all part of my queer self. Now, the pariah is always aware of when the door is shut of who becomes the new face of the unwanted. People will say, oh, you must be so happy, You must be so happy being a gay person. You know you don't have to take your allotted amount of toilet pill. First of all, there is still many who are metaphorically, and secondly, there are new Humanity didn't doesn't end with a queer positioning

in one time, in one place. Often there are there are what I hear are echoes or hints in your In your analysis of you spoke of working class consciousness. You spoke of identification across groups. And I wondered whether at any of these times that we've spoken about you self identified as a socialist or a Marxist store, And I wonder how that, how do you think about the interaction between that identity and your your other identities. Well, they're all of a piece, are past or like a rope.

But I my beginning point, Well, the women who stood beside me, and some were passing women, so they were would be part of it, a trance community, some with sex workers, and that's always been an important community to me. It was for them. Everything I did, in a way was for them. They touched my young woman's body. They were the first who gave me that deep pleasure. And but more than that, more than that, they gave me a narrative of courage with bruises, with hardship, with economic deprivation.

But they tried so fullheartedly to create a life for themselves. So I feel honored. I feel honored, and I feel honored to know the young people now who are trying to do the same in Trump America. Joan, thank you so much for taking us to the Sea Colony and to Stonewall, and to the entire world of people for whom you've worked and in whose honor you've described what

you've been doing. Thank you. It's an extraordinary honor for me to have the chance to talk to you, and I'm so grateful to you for sharing your stories with us. Oh I'm just sitting here pishing, But that's okay too. That's a good part of life as well. You've you've earned that. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a privilege and fascinating to hear from people like Joan Nessel and Mark Siegel, who both lived in such an immediate and powerful way a series of crucial historical moments

a whole long, complicated period of historical evolution. It's made me reflect on a lot of things. Among other things, it makes me reflect on my extraordinary and lucky privilege as a straight, white CIS gender man with his own podcast embarrassingly enough, who gets to talk to people who are fascinating, to people who have confronted real fundamental challenges, the Begger, the imagination when they compare to anything that

I've encountered in my life. It also makes me think going forward about how we should think about the legacy of civil rights struggles like the gain lesbian rights struggle that has followed Stonewall. Should we think of those struggles as models of what our society can achieve. Should we congratulate ourselves on what we've done and try to use that self congratulation to extend new rights to other vulnerable people like trans people. Well, that is part of it.

I think if we don't tell ourselves these stories of success, we will give up trying, We will become pessimistic, we won't make the effort the next time we need some myths of great success in civil rights to take us forward. At the same time, the great danger of that kind of self satisfied self gratulation, especially from people like me who come from privilege, is to say, look, how well we've done. We have extended rights to lots of people.

That has the effect of allowing us to be blind to continuing violations of rights, to ongoing forms of discrimination, to structural discrimination that comes from the economy, not only from the government but also from private sector entities, and to forms of exclusion that sometimes just pass by the consciousness of people who can get away with that, avoiding the consciousness of people who in fact suffer. So we

need both. We need to pat ourselves on the back just a little bit in order to have encouragement for the future. But we also need to keep our eyes open. We need to make sure that when the next civil rights movement begins, as many have, that it doesn't take fifty years for us to say, there you go, something significant has been accomplished. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Genecott, with engineering

by Jason Gambrel and Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gera special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background