Eric Marcus' historic interview with Morty Manford makes a fitting introduction to October's Gay History Month. After this early 90s interview was conducted, Morty Manford passed away.* His warm smile, however, lives vividly in my memory. jn

__________________________________________________________

MORTY MANFORD had little interest in politics in the late 1960s. In 1968, he was a hardworking seventeen-year-old college student at Columbia College who spent his spare time in gay bars in Greenwich Village. Marginally involved in the gay student group at Columbia, he did not become active in the movement until 1970, nearly a year after he witnessed the Stonewall Inn riot. Once he had been drawn into the gay movement, however, it became his life, inspiring youthful outrage that led him to drop out of school to join his "sisters and brothers in the struggle for gay liberation."

Now a lawyer working for the New York State attorney general's office, Morty Manford was raised in a quiet, semisuburban neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, in the same house he now shares with his widowed mother, Jeanne. Morty is a handsome man of medium build, with short brown hair.* He measured his words carefully before speaking:

Before I became involved in the gay rights movement, I first had to come out. That battle was intense. It was a personal civil war that started around the age of fifteen or sixteen. The conflict was over trying to repress my homosexuality in order to conform to society's values. I remember extremely intense mental activity all the time.

I began seeing a psychiatrist. I don't think he paid too much attention to my homosexuality. He was trying to focus on other supposedly underlying reasons for my "adolescent adjustment" problem, as he called it. Then things got worse. The sexual issue was tearing me apart. The whole society w as telling us it was horrible. A homosexual was a flaky, vacuous, bizarre person. If you wanted to insult somebody then (as now), you accused him of being a faggot. The newspapers always referred to homosexuals and perverts as if they were one and the same. The official line from psychiatrists was that homosexuals were inherently sick. Homosexual acts were illegal. People referred to homosexuality in terms of sinfulness. This attitude was pervasive.

People didn't realize the impact such positions and attitudes had on gay men and women. These attitudes affected the way you thought and lived, what you felt, and how you thought of yourself. If you were gay and you accepted those societal norms, then you were at war with yourself.

I changed psychiatrists. The new psychiatrist was a dynamic guy. I wouldn't say he was approving, and he did some things I found very objectionable, like telling my parents I was gay without getting my permission. However, in the course of our therapy, he said some fairly positive things. He told me, "It doesn't matter. I don't care if you want to fuck an animal or a woman or a man."

By then my desires were sufficiently strong that I decided I was going to do something about them. I went to Manhattan and walked and walked, hoping that somebody would come sweep me off the street and make mad, passionate love to me.

Well, it happened. I was seventeen, and this fellow was a few months older than I was. He was a beauty: blonde, with blue eyes, a boyish kind of face, and a swimmer's body. Nice smile warm smile. And a nice person. He had this sort of colorful quality to his personality. Everything had a little flair. He had a black cape and, I think, a silver-tipped cane. He just had fun. Of course, back in the late sixties all young people were dressing with a lot of individual taste and wearing colorful clothes. It was the love generation. On the other hand, I always wore blue jeans and a flannel shirt--very plain.

We met at this public forum at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street. It was where people would gather; all the local Greenwich Village intellectuals, or pseudo-intellectuals, would come out and debate the issues of importance. This was the summer of 1968. People literally debated the issues in the news, the civil rights struggle, the political direction of our country. This fellow started talking to me. We were talking about the world and social issues. The two of us just kept on talking. He said, "Let's walk. Let's go get a drink." We must have spent six or eight hours that night just walking and talking. He made a few vague allusions to homosexuality, to test my reaction, I guess. I didn't say too much in response.

He was staying with a homosexual man in the Bronx. It was an untenable situation, he said. And I said, "Well, if you need a place to stay for a few days, you're welcome to come and stay with me in Flushing."

First we went to his place in the Bronx. We took the subway. He got a few things. Then we came back here to my parents' house and talked all through the night. I remember the sun was up when we went to sleep.

He was working as a waiter in a restaurant in Manhattan. One evening I went to pick him up at work with the car, and he said, "A few of us from the restaurant are going over to a bar down the block to have a drink. " We walked into this bar on the Upper East Side, and I was stunned because it was all men in there, and they were all dancing together. I was amazed and delighted and anxious. He danced with one of his friends and then turned to me and asked me to dance a slow dance.

It was a moment of such.... It was your greatest desire and your greatest fear all in one. I knew I wanted to dance with him. We danced. I think the song they were playing was "Turn Around, Look at Me." It goes something like, "There is someone walking behind you. Turn around, look at me. There is someone to love and guide you. Turn around, look at me." (I can't sing.)

We left the bar and came back here to Flushing, and the fireworks were in the sky that night. My conflict persisted in diminishing increments for a few years, but that night was a milestone.

AT THIS point I had already graduated from Bayside High School and was getting ready to start as a freshman at Columbia College in fall of 1968. That spring, before I graduated, there had been an article on the front page of the New York Times about the official recognition of the Student Homophile League at Columbia. I think the league was first formed on an underground basis in the fall-winter of 1966. I had already been accepted to Columbia, and I was excited that there was a gay group there.

When I started school, I called the Student Homophile League. Although you could call their office number from any phone on campus, I went off campus to a telephone booth to dial. I was still very afraid of being discovered by anybody. The group hadn't reassembled for the semester, so it took a couple of weeks before somebody got back to me. The student who called said, "I'll come visit you. We'll talk." I told him where I was. I was in the dormitory. Two of them showed up. We went off campus to a coffee shop. We sat and talked a little bit. They asked me to come to a meeting, which I did a week or so later. I wasn't terribly inspired by what I saw in the Student Homophile League, and nothing they were doing really interested me. It was a very loose affiliation at that time.

At this point I had already discovered the bars. I suppose my gay life pretty much revolved around going to the bars, even though there was always the threat of bar raidsÑeveryone heard about them. But the only raid where I was actually inside the bar was at the Stonewall. That was in late June 1969.

The Stonewall was my favorite place. It was a dive. It was shabby, and the glasses they served the watered-down drinks in weren't particularly clean. The place attracted a very eclectic crowd. Patrons included every type of person: some transvestites, a lot of students, young people, older people, businessmen. It was an interesting place. I met friends at the Stonewall regularly. There was a dance floor and a jukebox. There was a back-room area, which in those days meant there was another bar in back. There were tables where people sat.

The night of the raid, some men in suits and ties entered the place and walked around a little bit. Then whispers went around that the place was being raided. Suddenly, the lights were turned up, and the doors were sealed, and all the patrons were held captive until the police decided what they were going to do. I was anxious, but I wasn't afraid. Everybody was anxious, not knowing whether we were going to be arrested or what was going to happen.

It may have been ten or fifteen minutes later that we were all told to leave. We had to line up, and our identification was checked before we were freed. People who did not have identification or were under age and all transvestites were detained. Those who didn't meet whatever standards the police had were incarcerated temporarily in the coatroom. The coat closet. Little did the police know the ironic symbolism of that. But they found out fast.

As people were released, they stayed outside. They didn't run away. They waited for their friends to come out. People who were walking up and down Christopher Street, which was a very busy cruising area at that time, also assembled. The crowd in front of the Stonewall grew and grew.

I stayed to watch. As some of the gays came out of the bar, they would take a bow, and their friends would cheer. It was a colorful scene. Tension started to grow. After everybody who was going to be released was released, the prisoners--transvestites and bar personnel, bartenders, and the bouncers--were herded into a paddy wagon that was parked right on the sidewalk in front of the bar. The prisoners were left unguarded by the local police; they simply walked out of the paddy wagon to the cheer of the throng. There's no doubt in my mind that those people were deliberately left unguarded. I assume there was some sort of a relationship between the bar management and the local police, so they really didn't want to arrest these people. But they had to at least look like they were trying to do their jobs.

Once all of the people were out and the prisoners went on their merry ways, the crowd stayed. I don't know how to characterize the motives of the crowd at that point, except to say there was curiosity and concern about what had just happened. Then some people in the crowd started throwing pennies across the street at the front of the Stonewall. Then someone apparently threw a rock, which broke one of the windows on the second floor. The Stonewall had a couple of great big plate-glass windows in the front. They were painted black on the inside. And there was a doorway in between them, which was the entrance. The building had a second floor, which I think was used for storage space. With the shattering of the glass of the second-floor window, the crowd collectively exclaimed, "Ooh." It was a dramatic gesture of defiance.

For me, there was a slight lancing of the festering wound of anger that had been building for so long over this kind of unfair harassment and prejudice. It wasn't my fault that many of the bars where I could meet other gay people were run by organized crime. Because of the system of official discrimination on the part of state liquor authorities and the corruption of the local police authorities, these were the only kind of bars that were permitted to serve a gay clientele. None of that was my doing.

The tension escalated. A few more rocks went flying, and then somebody from inside the bar opened the door and stuck out a gun. He yelled for people to stay back. Then he withdrew the gun, closed the door, and went back inside. Somebody took an uprooted parking meter and broke the glass in the front window and the plywood board that was behind it. Then somebody else took a garbage can, one of those wire-mesh cans, set it on fire, and threw the burning garbage into the premises. The area that was set afire was where the coatroom was.

They had a fire hose inside, and they used it. It was a small trash fire. Then they opened the front door and turned the hose on the crowd to try to keep people at a distance. That's when the riot erupted.

Apparently, a fire engine had been summoned because of the trash fire. As it came down the block, uniformed police started to arrive. They came down the street in a phalanx of blue with their riot gear on. In those days the New York City police had a guerrilla-prone cadre known as the Tactical Police Force, the TPF.

Who knows whether the violence would have escalated in the way it did if the TPF had not come in? That's what they always looked for; they wanted confrontation. Chasing after people and hitting them with their billy clubs, I think, provoked a greater response than there would have been otherwise. One way or the other, though, gay people had stood up and rebelled.

I watched. I wasn't looking for a fight. I can't claim credit for the small acts of violence that took place. I didn't break any windows. I wasn't the one who had a knife and cut the tires on the paddy wagon.

I didn't hit a cop and didn't get hit by a cop. But it was a very emotional turning point for me. It was the first time I had seen anything like that.

Once they started attacking people and forcing people onto the side streets, I tried to get out of the way. I saw people breaking windows, but I didn't stay too much longer. I returned the next night to see what was going on because the riot was continuing. For me, this festering wound, the anger from oppression and discrimination, was coming out very fast at the point of Stonewall.

Several days later I went to Philadelphia to march in the annual picket line in front of Independence Hall. It was July 4, 1969. I think I wore sunglasses. When I saw cameras, I turned my face away. I went with friends from New York, from the Stonewall. That night, back at home in Flushing, I had a personal crisis over somebody I was infatuated with and I attempted suicide. The relationship wasn't progressing as I had wanted. On some level he rejected me. I think that all of my own conflict was starting to come to the surface. Even though I had been actively gay for almost a year at this point, the struggle was still going on. I took a large quantity of pills--tranquilizers. I had gotten them from the psychiatrist.

My parents found me. In my stupor I must have gotten up and fallen and made some noise. I spent a few months in a psychiatric hospital. It was not uncommon in those days for gay people to attempt suicide. I remember many young people who I met telling me about their attempted suicides. It was not uncommon to see somebody with stitch marks on their wrists.

THE FOLLOWING March, in 1970, I was sitting with some friends having a sandwich at Mama's Chick n' Rib, a coffee shop on Greenwich Avenue popular with gay people, when a demonstration went by. Hundreds upon hundreds of people with protest signs were chanting. It was obviously a gay demonstration. I said to my friends at the table, "Let's join it." Nobody wanted to join it. I said, "I'll see you later." I wasn't going to let the parade go by.

The purpose of this march was to protest police conduct at the raid of a bar called the Snake Pit. One of the customers who was taken prisoner was an Argentine national who leapt from the second-story window of the precinct headquarters in a panicked attempt to escape deportation. He became impaled on a steel fence. The moral outrage was certainly very personal in my own heart.

At the conclusion of the march a number of people went over to the headquarters of the Gay Liberation Front at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. I went with them. There were some speeches. I really was left uninspired by their political line. My impression was that they were talking about general revolution, which I had heard plenty of around Columbia. This talk didn't really address my subconscious, and increasingly conscious, concerns about being gay or my reasons for joining the march in the first place. They were talking about some black cause and some antiwar cause, about meetings that were coming up in the next week or so. It was just a general rallying point for the New Left. I was sympathetic to all of those things, but somehow or another I was extremely busy as a student and didn't get involved in the New Left issues. I was a hardworking student and spent virtually all my time studying. The only breaks I had from being a serious student were my journeys down to the Stonewall.

Somebody at that GLF meeting who I was talking to mentioned another group to me, the Gay Activists Alliance. When I went to GAA's next weekly meeting, the political discussion was appealing, so I joined GAA, and things started to move very fast in terms of my political education.

GAA's express purpose was gay liberation. Organizationally it was a cardinal rule that we were going to limit our agenda to gay liberation issues. We felt that by doing so we could draw together gays of all political persuasions: lesbians, gay men, gay youth, conservatives, right.wing people, left-wing people. And, in fact, this is what we did. We had a tremendous range of types and ages. And by focusing on a common agenda, gay rights and gay liberation, we avoided a lot of conflict that might have otherwise torn the group apart.

At GAA we hrst and foremost wanted to send a message to other lesbians and gays in the closet that there was an alternative to the homophobic message that we'd all been imbued with. Second, wherever there was antigay and antilesbian discrimination, we would oppose it. We addressed a vast range of discriminatory policies, from the policy at certain gay bars of excluding transvestites to avowed employment discrimination against gays by private industry.

We very early decided, as a strategic focus, to work for the enactment of civil rights legislation in the New York City Council. That campaign involved participation on many different levels. Some people were involved in lobbying. Our focus was highlighting, for the benefit of the gay public as well as for the heterosexual public, that there was, in fact, discrimination; that it was improper and morally objectionable; and that that's why we needed legislation. Our protests focused on discrimination in three main areas: employment, housing, and places of public accommodation.

There were bars and restaurants that had policies against admitting gay customers. When people were ejected from the Gold Rail up at Columbia because somebody kissed a friend hello and was judged to be gay, we had a demonstration and a "kiss-in." We went to the bar en masse as gays and started to kiss each other to affirm our rights. I think this demonstration was led by the Columbia group. We had maybe thirty or forty people at the kiss-in. We kissed and kissed until the management agreed it would not again refuse to serve anybody who was gay. And we left as fast as we had come in.

Once I got involved in GAA, I quickly became active in the Columbia organization. We changed the group's focus, and we changed its name to Gay People at Columbia. We tried to make demonstrations fun and campy, and enjoyable, as well as making sure they had a serious impact. There was a demonstration at an investigatory firm called Fidelifacts. These were private investigators who served em. ployers by trying to track down information on, among other things, people's sexual lives. That information was used to fire gay employees. When asked, "How do you know somebody is homosexual?" the guy who ran Fidelifacts said, "If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then I assume it's a duck." So we rented a duck costume and sent one person there dressed up like a duck, of course, handing out our leaflets. And we addressed the media. We had little squeaky rubber ducks that made a noise, a sharp piercing noise. It was a very loud protest right on Forty-Second Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, where the Fidelifacts offices were.

There was a demonstration at Park West Village, an apartment complex up on Central Park West, because the owners had a policy of not permitting two women or two men to rent an apartment. The assumption was that they might be doing something in these apartments that the owners didn't approve of.

This was a very idealistic era, when young people felt they could change the world. We truly felt we were being a part of history. We were doing something new. We were doing something righteous. We were part of the generation of committed youths.

IT WAS soon after I first started attending the GAA meetingsthat I was arrested for the first time. I was with a friendwho lived at Fifteen Christopher Street, and we were sitting on the steps directly across the street from his apartment. Christopher Street was the heart of gay street life in New York City at that time. There were many bars along the street. People would go in and out of bars, walk to a restaurant or to another bar, or just stand and watch the street traffic. This was 1970. I was nineteen.

Some people walked hand in hand down Christopher Street. Actually, at that point, the only ones doing that were members of GAA, who held hands as much for the sheer joy of it as for the political statement. We made a point to do it, and not just on Christopher Street. We tried to emphasize the positive, the joyful aspects of being gay. A simple act like holding hands was something that most gays at the time wouldn't do in public. So my friend and I were just sitting there on Christopher Street.

The police came along and said, "Move along." And one of us, probably me, said, "Why?" And the cops just said, "Move along. You can't sit here." They didn't want to argue the point. And we said, "No." They were familiar with gay demonstrations, but I don't think they expected two kids to stand up to them. I think they threatened us, "If you don't move, you'll get arrested." We said, "All right, we're not moving." So they arrested us. They brought us to the police station. They said, "We'll give you desk-appearance tickets." And we said, "No." If we had simply accepted desk-appearance tickets, which ate summonses, we would have had to come back individually in a few weeks to appear in court and face the charges. That wouldn't have made the point that we were opposing the conduct of the police. So we refused, and they locked us up for the night.

We wanted to push this to the point where they knew this was a political protest. They were harassing us because we were gay. They didn't walk through the East Village in those days, where there were a lot of young hippie-type people, and bother the ostensibly heterosexual community. They didn't walk along side streets on Manhattan's West Side and. tell people they had to move. There's a lot of street life in New York in residential areas. And this area wasn't even residential. This was basically a commercial strip. We felt that we had to put an end to this police harassment.

We were allowed to make a couple of phone calls. We called Arthur Evans, the chairman of GAA's political action committee. He was also a very dear friend of mine. I knew he would do the right thing in alerting people that two of our members had been arrested. We made another call to this new candidate for Congress in the Village district, who had expressed her interest in supporting gay rights in a meeting with some representatives of GAA. So we decided to give her a call to let her know what the police were doing on the streets of Greenwich Village. I don't think I called home. It was two o'clock in the morning, and I may not have wanted to wake up my mother at that hour. But I didn't mind waking up this ambitious politician, Bella Abzug.

We stayed overnight in jail, from two o'clock until ten o'clock in the morning. A few hours in jail were insignificant. This was the fight for liberation. When we got to court in the morning, Bella Abzug had sent a lawyer to represent us. They brought us to a series of holding cells in the courthouse downtown. Ultimately, we were placed on a bench in the courtroom as our case was getting ready to be called. Then when our case was called, the two of us walked up to the table where defendants stand with our arms around each other's shoulders. The judge started screaming at us about this public display. But we wanted to make it clear to the judge that the police action was politically motivated.

The judge had the case "second called," which means "Sit down. Get your act together, and we'll call your case again in ten or twenty minutes." The attorney came over to us and said, "You can't do that here. The judge can't deal with it." He wasn't telling us there was anything wrong with what we were doing. He was a good guy. He gave us ample representation. He wanted to make some sort of a statement on our behalf, to calm down the judge. I think what he ended up saying was, "My clients meant no disrespect, but Your Honor has to understand they were arrested because they are gay" and so on and so forth.

The case was dismissed. We weren't guilty of doing anything wrong. And justice was ultimately done in the dismissal. All of these things were firsts for all of us. Every demonstration, every issue, had this sense of "It's something new." We had brought our issue into the judiciary. We had brought the issue of our rights into the chambers of government, the legislature, and the mayor's office. Unlike the things we did at GAA, we did this as individuals. At GAA all the protests were done as a group, usually a very loud and vocal group. I don't know that I'd call what we did gutsy, but it was the right thing to do. If we had turned and walked away when the police told us to walk away, we wouldn't have felt right about ourselves.

SOMEHOW OR another I had encounter after encounter, face to face with John Lindsay, the city's mayor. One time was on my twenty-first birthday. The mayor was speaking at New York University on the Vietnam War. The week or so preceding his speech, there had been some raids on gay bars. The police were going wild raiding the bars. Classically they did this each year as the elections started to roll around. The politicians would want to build up their statistics for the coming elections to show that the police were arresting all these perverts. Those were the sorts of things they would say in the New York Times. We had already reached the point where we weren't going to stand by and let this stuff happen.

I think there was a big uproar at One Sheridan Square, which was a bar. The police had physically beaten some gay people who were there. Police brutality against gays was the inspiration for the demonstration at NYU against John Lindsay. That was September 17, 1971: Constitution Day.

We had our demonstration outside. We set up our picket lines. We had scores of people. We wanted to go into the hall and protest, but people were having trouble getting inside. It was a quickly organized protest. Somehow I got inside. There I was. A thousand people sitting in the audience. And the mayor was up at the podium talking. And what was I going to do? It was just me. So naturally I did what anyone else would do. I walked onto the stage and I took the podium away from John Lindsay. I walked right up next to him and I said, so the audience could hear, "The police are brutalizing gay people three blocks away from where you're sitting." Before I could say much more, the police dragged me off the back of the stage and ejected me through an exit.

Apparently, after I left, the audience called the mayor to account for what was going on with the police bothering the gay community. This was Greenwich Village. You had a lot of progressive people who had already been exposed to two years of gay rights propaganda--actually counterpropaganda to all the heterosexual negativism. The one thing they couldn't deal with was violence going on against us. These were people who were genuinely interested in peace and the antiwar movement. Apparently John Lindsay had made the statement that he would permit me to speak. Of course, he knew darn well that the police had already thrown me out. He didn't realize that I'd be back.

I snuck back in. I can't remember how I broke through the security lines again, but I got back in and I came right down the aisle. I could see the mayor looking up from the podium at me, biting his lip and thinking, Oh shit, here he comes again. I walked right back up on stage and said, "I understand you said I can speak." And he said, "Yes," and yielded the podium to me. I addressed the audience about the police brutality and the harassment we were facing. I said my piece. I thanked them and left as surreptitiously as I entered. What I did had to be done. It was simply a matter of believing that it was the right thing to do. I believed that political protest was going to bring some cure to the problems we were facing.

Another time, we held a protest at Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center. This was a fund-raising event for John Lindsay's presidential campaign. It was a well-planned demonstration.

In talking about these things, I hope I'm not giving the impression that I did all these things on my own. These were all team efforts. I was active in them. I participated. I got arrested in a lot of them. But many people worked on them. The Political Action Committee of GAA did the planning for the Radio City protest. We went to Radio City weeks in advance to case the place and figure out the logistics for a demonstration. We spent hours thinking of all the possibilities and contingencies. The man was running for president. Lindsay was going to have Secret Service men with him. These guys were very touchy, so we weren't going to attempt to go near him physically.

We got about ten tickets to the event from our fifth columnists, people on the inside who had access to tickets. The audience was filled with public officials, city employees, and members of the media. A number of us had already become fairly well known to the politicians in the city because we had been lobbying at City Hall for legislation and other things. So we had to disguise ourselves. I remember a few of us put on false moustaches or sunglasses or different kinds of clothes. We had somebody who knew how to do these things, so it looked right. We infiltrated the crowd at Radio City Music Hall.

We went to our appointed locations. I think I was the first one to speak. The trigger was when John Lindsay started talking. We had decided we were not going to permit him to speak until he addressed the problems of the police department brutalizing gays on the streets. The police were going into bars and beating up people during the raids. There were also raids on the baths. The police arrested people and then they'd call up employers and say, "Your senior clerk was just arrested in a gay bar."

Anyhow, there was a group of us who were going to do things inside. There were about five hundred people from many groups demonstrating outside, but we had one of the largest groups out there. And because we were also on the inside, it became a Lindsay versus gay event.

I was up in the mezzanine, where all the media were located. I was at one end and Cora Perotta was at the other. Alan King did his routine to get the audience all giddy for John Lindsay. I went right up to the railing at the front of the mezzanine and handcuffed myself to it. As Lindsay started to speak, I made my statement: "Homosexuals need your help to end police harassment!" Then Cora stood up on her chair at the other end and started yelling. We had people down in the orchestra. Some people had little pocket alarms in case you're being raped. You're supposed to pull the pin out, throw the pin one way, and throw the alarm the other way to chase off a mugger or a rapist. We had several alarms, which created upset. We were all shouting that the police were harassing and brutalizing gays. "You've got to stop this!"

In the meantime, the police were trying to get my handcuffs off. I told them that I had thrown away the key, but I had hidden it in my vest pocket. If they hadn't come along to take off my handcuffs, I didn't want to be left there all night attached to the balcony rail.

While all this chaos was going on, one lively fellow from GAA tried to come into the mezzanine where I was located. When he got stopped, he said to the guard at the door, "Officer, I'm here to arrest that man." He meant me. So they let him in, and he went up to the front of the mezzanine. He had a raincoat on. Underneath the coat he had a couple of thousand leaflets. He then showered the orchestra seats with all these leaflets, which described the police atrocities directed at gays. All this time, while we were honking and hooting and shouting our one-liners, Alan King was trying to convince Lindsay, "Let me try talking to them." But once the place was showered with leaflets, you could see their sense of loss. They had lost this battle. They left the stage. John Lindsay was supposed to do a song and dance for the crowd. The curtain came down, and they started to show a movie that was part of the program for the evening.

I was still there when the movie began. All these police were tinkering around. They had lots of keys to handcuffs, but it took them a while to find one that fit mine. I just let them tinker. And I kept on shouting while they were tinkering. They took us out and released us. They didn't arrest us that time. You see, at certain kinds of events we were prepared to be arrested, but we knew it would make John Lindsay look bad to arrest people who were protesting a legitimate issue. His problem was that he pretended to have values that he was not living up to. He pretended to be for these very generalized civil rights issues. We started getting some real restraint from the police following a number of these demonstrations. There was a definite cause and effect there.

BESIDES THE protests, I was also involved in organizing. One summer in the early seventies, my friend Lou Todd and I did an organizing tour in the South. It was the same year that two other people from GAA did an organizing tour of the Midwest. We went out like Johnny Appleseeds. Lou and I covered fifteen cities in the South in Lou's yellow Datsun. GAA paid for the gas. We were lucky if there was anybody in those towns who had heard about gay liberation.

We used our wits to meet people in the gay community. You'd meet one person and ask questions: "Where do we meet other people?" "Are there any organizations?" There rarely were. But there were bars. You'd go in. You'd find somebody who you could talk to who might have heard something, and you'd try to interest them in helping get local people to talk with us about the new gay liberation movement.

We had lots of adventures. Many stories. There were a couple of wonderful men down in New Orleans. They were lovers. They had apartments, one above the other. They gave us one of the apartments. We didn't stay in any hotels. We traveled on the hospitality of the gay community.

There was one colorful fellow in Charlotte, North Carolina. We located him because he was listed in a gay guide as some sort of gay organization. We went to the address, and it was the man's house. He was very nice, but kooky. There was no gay organization there. He had himself listed in one of those national guides so he could make pickups. People would come into town, and he'd be the first one to meet them. Of course, we didn't get into any compromising situation with this guy, but everything he did was wild and wacky. He had a get-together for us. We invited everybody from the town we could talk to. We went to the bars. We worked the crowd. "Come to Tom's house Saturday afternoon." Some people came. There was a woman there. She must have been eighty years old. She made us a great big bowl of potato salad, at least twenty pounds of potatoes. Everybody was telling us about how sixty years earlier, she had hacked her sister to death with a hatchet. Those are the sort of things you remember.

It was a different world from New York. New York was, for a gay activist, such an extreme. It was an intense, exciting place. You can't undervalue the moral support of the group--people sharing common commitments in a hostile world, a world where you were confronting prejudice. But it was so important to go into a place where nothing was happening yet. We wrote long reports every day and sent them back to the people at GAA, because the intention was to continue to support the local groups' efforts directly and indirectly, through providing money, advice, literature, or whatever. Groups emerged very fast in some of those places. Some of them even called themselves GAA.

I HAD interrupted my college education to "join the revolution, to fight with my sisters and brothers in the street." When I left Columbia, my letter to the dean said basically that. I didn't return to Columbia to finish school until the fall of 1976.

Upon returning to Columbia, I reduced my activism to doing research and writing papers. At this point I had resolved I was going to finish my education. I wanted to become a lawyer. I devoted my energies to those pursuits.

By that time, the mid-1970s, the movement had started to turn direction. The National Gay Task Force, a national gay organization founded in 1973, and the Advocate, a gay newspaper, had sold a lot of people on the idea of gay respectability. It was an antiactivist type of gay theology. The idea of gay respectability was all right, but being antiactivist wasn't. Their more conservative, more Establishment approach was all right. I believed then, and I believe now, that the movement needs both activists and Establishment people. The activists make it possible for the more Establishment-oriented gays to gain entree. The activists break down barriers that it would take the more conservative types years to do, if they could do it at all.

This more conservative trend grew for many reasons: the demise of the antiwar movement; the evacuation of Richard Nixon from the White House; and the general dissipation of the Left, which had really been held together by the antiwar movement. People were becoming more self-centered. The whole national psyche was changing.

I suppose that people had become tired of all of the activism and the confrontation tactics as a means of dealing with problems. Once the war was over, national sympathy for demonstrations abated. It was getting very difficult to get large numbers of people to come out and demonstrate. In 1970 or 1971 we were having demonstrations where we got three and four hundred people to show up. By the mid-1970s, we were having trouble getting fifty people.

I saw the changes in attitude dramatically when I returned to Columbia in 1976. When I was a student there in 1969 and 1970, the classroom was an exciting place because of the students. No matter what the professors said, somebody challenged them: All authority and tradition were subject to question. In the fall of 1976, I returned to the very same school, and when professors asked a question, just one hand would pop up: mine.

IN THE early years of GAA's activism, there was an awful lot of resentment from other gays over our tactics and our openness. People thought we should not be protesting against the antigay policies of the mayor. Their arguments were not really reasoned. They just thought we were going to make things worse, that public resentment would end up being directed at gays. Our own view was that it was important to bring to the surface the deep down anger and resentment that gays had against the repressive policies of society. It was a process whereby gays started to become aware of gay rights as a political issue. And it was part of the long process of achieving positive self-identification as gays and lesbians. We didn't let the negativism of other gays bother us. I think time has proven that we did the right thing.

________________________________________________________________________

• Excerpted from: Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945-1990, An Oral History, by Eric Marcus, HarperCollins, 1992. Eric Marcus' most recent book is Icebreaker: The Autobiography of Rudy Galindo, Pocket Books, 1997. Information about Eric Marcus'works can be found on his Webpage: www.EricMarcus.com.
• _____________________________________________________________________