From the Publisher: Experience Trumps Hearsay

We've received several e-mails in response to a paragraph in the Letter from the Editor which appeared in the May 30th issue of Metroline. Specifically the paragraph read: "Stonewall was not simply as activist protest where they went home afterward and partied. They were beaten and dragged away to jail by the police. It was a time when fag bashing was an accepted method of controlling homos and keeping them out of the neighborhood. There were no drag queens there at all. It was gay human beings simply standing up for being who they were."

I was a very "out" gay man at the time of the so-called Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, so I feel qualified to comment on those e-mails.

I had left my wife and son in 1968 and gotten the courage to be the gay person I was created to be - no more hating myself and no more hiding. I responded to a Hartford Times classified for a roommate and moved into Hartford's Asylum Hill area. We shared the apartment together and lived together for nearly two months , never questioned the sexual preference of each other. I discovered he was gay when I brought a young man to the apartment for an affair and he told me he had been there before and had had an affair with my roommate.

After a short time I discovered a group of gay men at a newly formed organization called The Kalos Society which had been organized by the Rev. Canon Clinton Jones and Project H of Christ Church Cathedral. The Meetings were held in downtown Hartford at The Blue Door on Lewis Street. I began attend meetings on Thursday nights and for the first time in my life had an opportunity to communicate with other gay men: to talk, share stories of our homosexual experiences and socialize. Aside from the bars, that's all there was in Hartford, or in Connecticut for that matter. I never thought at the time my dedication would consume my life. I became so involved I was unable to maintain a relationship, or to date for that matter. My life was filled with meetings, demonstrations, consciousness raising and working on the Griffin, the first gay publication in Connecticut. I lived gay pride day and night. Looking back it seems all I ever talked to people about was gay liberation. After four or five years I needed to withdraw and find my life again. So I have learned to say no. I'm not alone with these feelings. I've seen it happen to those generations that have followed. You can only stay actively involved for so long and you finally burn out. Today it seems, that kind of dedication is no longer necessary since most groups are more established.

Through Kalos I met Ron Malvin, Ken Bland, Wesley Poleio, Rich Stankowicz, Len Simon and others who were to become good friends and part of my life and the changes that were about to affect my life and gay life in Hartford. Together we determined that more needed to be done other than meeting socially once a week, so we started discussing and planning what we felt was necessary to bring about acceptance and equality for our community.

We began publishing The Griffin, and distributing it in the community. With the help of Canon Jones, we set up speaking engagements at local schools. I personally spoke at Central Connecticut State University, Eastern Connecticut State University and Farmington High School at a time when no one knew much about homosexuality and when we were discovering ourselves. We let people know that we were really no different then they were except that we were drawn to people of the same sex. If I was asked what two men did together (as straight college men liked to ask) I would simply ask what that person did in bed. Really, I stated, all you have to do is use your imagination.

Twelve gay men from Kalos were arrested for picketing the Park West a local bar in 1972, because they had established a dress code for women. The truth was, Pat Shea, the owner of the bar, didn't want women at the bar. So in order to enter, women needed to wear a dress. As a direct result of our picketing the Park West changed its dress code. Even though there were only two women in the Kalos group we were willing to confront discrimination against lesbian too.

We confronted south end residents who said they didn't want us to use Goodwin Park for a Kalos picnic. We used the park and in the process educated people who realized we were really not much different than they were. That day many of these people began to realize they had probably never knowingly met homosexual people before. I came out where I worked at Travelers Insurance Company in 1970. I spent hours talking to my manager and officers about what my life as a gay man was like. The result was that as long as I never did anything that would embarrass the company, they were fine with who I was.

One senior officer made a comment I have never understood, although I never questioned him about it. He said he could understand two men having sex but couldn't understand why two women would. Perhaps he figured the only way one could enjoy sex is with a penis. But the fact remained, I was promoted on a regular basis and spent many hours educating co-workers. I have found that if people like you as a person, and if you aren't in their faces, they will like you whether your're gay or not.

Through Kalos I met activists in other cities. I spent a week at the loft of Mattachine Society President Dick Leitsch in late 1968 and learned a lot about how they operated and what they were hoping to accomplish in New York. In later years, when Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) became the leading activist group, I attended some of those meetings and dances at a converted firehouse they rented in the village.

My friendship with Hartford native Foster Gunnison, who was active in the national scene through the National Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO), which consisted of representatives from Society for Individual Rights (SIR) and Daughters of Bolitis in San Francisco, ONE, Inc in Los Angeles, other chapters of Mattachine and other groups, began also at Kalos. Foster operated the Institute of Social Ethics in Hartford and had amassed material to create one of the country's largest gay archives.

Through Foster I met Craig Rodwell and Frank Kamany. Rodwell, along with Foster and others from New York's gay organizations, was one of the principal organizers of the first Liberation Day March in New York. He also owned Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore on Christopher Street just a short walk to the Stonewall. His bookstore is reported to be the first gay bookstore in the country. Kamany worked at the national level with Foster at NACHO and I got to talk with him extensively when he stayed at my apartment during a visit to Hartford. I learned that both Kamany and Gunnison had demonstrated at the White House in 1965.

In 1971, Jim Owles, president of the Gay Activists Alliance and Morty Manford, another New York activist came to Hartford to participate in Connecticut's first gay march dubbed the Connecticut Liberation Festival, that we had organized in Hartford. That march, which drew about 150 gay men, began at Elizabeth Park and ran down Farmington Avenue to the State Capital, It was presented as a celebration of the newly revised Connecticut Penal Code, which made homosexual acts legal in Connecticut, but we also used the occasion to demand that we have laws to protect gay people in employment, housing and public accommodations as well. In the early gay movement it wasn't unusual for gay people from other cities to travel to your city, or for us to travel to other cities to bring additional members to a demonstration. I have participated in countless vigils and marches in other cities including New York, Boston, Albany, and Washington, as well as locally.

Being as involved as I was in the movement back then, I was asked to be a street marshall at the first New York march in 1970 and again in 1971. We actually went through training to learn techniques for handling possible fights and outbreaks. Early marches were not festive as they later became. We shouted gay slogans ...give me a G, give me a A, give me a Y. I can tell you from my experience of being there myself that I never recall seeing a drag queen, lots of raging queens, but no drag queens. Were drag queens there but perhaps wearing street clothes? Probably they were, but the community had not yet achieved any measurable degree of safety which would allow the freedom to be seen in public in small groups. That's one of the things we were working to accomplish. Not just the right to be who we were, but the safety to be who we were in public.

Back then there was a difference between queens and drag queens just as there is today. We called each other queens in the sixties and seventies and many articles written on the topic referred to the queens that were at Stonewall. And as they did in New York, we had names for each other. I was Lillian, my best friends were Charlotte, Lucille, Blanche, Alice and Carla. Many bar queens in Hartford had a name even if it was only Mary. You were either "Butch" acting or "Queen" acting. Both were perfectly okay but the queens got more attention because being so different from the stereotypical macho male of the day, queens simply attracted it. I think this is where so much of the focus on drag queens being there actually comes from.

Something else that you wouldn't have seen at the early Pride marches were men in leather with their butts hanging out, lesbians walking topless up Sixth Avenue as they have walking down Fifth Avenue in later marches. And there were no floats or Grand Marshalls. The early events were marches, not parades, and In fact all of those elements of a gay parade came in later years. The first time I actually ever saw a drag queen in Connecticut was at a Halloween Party at Nicks Cafe in Hartford in 1971. I can't say there were no drag queens around, most likely if they were on the streets they had street clothes over their dresses. There were probably leather folk too, but not visibly. In those early years, and this may ruffle some feathers, I never saw a drag queen at demonstrations at any of the cities I was in. I'm not stating that there were no drag queens in a hurtful way. It was a huge risk to be on display as a gay person and even more so in drag in the late sixties and early seventies. People were fearful of being overly obvious as the mood of the country was not at all as it is today.

Admittedly I was not at Stonewall during the riots. But I was familiar with the bar which had lots of teenagers (the drinking age at that time was 18), queens and drag queens, and I was very familiar with gay life in New York City. My understanding has always been that police officers from the local precinct were called to the Stonewall to quell trouble not once that evening in June, but twice. And those officers reported that the disturbance outside began when a young shirtless man, followed by a second man incited the gathered crowd by yelling that the police were killing people inside. It should be remembered that these people had been drinking all evening, they were not heroes. Many of their actions were most likely brought on by the alcohol. Bear in mind too, that it wasn't the incident at the Stonewall that progressed into the Gay Liberation movement. Stonewall became the catalyst, for the gay groups that were already in place, to become more vocal and to become more activist. Some members of Mattachine who felt the organization wasn't being politically active enough formed a new organization, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), and a short time later members from that group who felt the GLF group with its many cells were not activist enough broke off and began the more activist Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). This group would confront city officials, businesses and even the national television networks. It was these groups too, working with the Christopher Liberation Day Committee that planned the first march. Similar groups became more vocal around the country, including right here in Hartford. I believe, and I know Joe DaBrow does also, that the work Jerimarie Liesegang and others are doing today is important. When I was involved in the gay movement we at Kalos who were all gay men, discussed many times, how we could connect with lesbians, people of color and others. But there were no places to meet others except within our own small group or at the bars. Even many gay men back then saw us as threatening to them for being so "out." Bar owners looked at us with distrust too. It wasn't until 1972 we were able to draw the first two lesbians into Kalos.

One thing that has confused me over the years is the connection between gay liberation and crossdressing or, for that matter, wearing leather. To me, and to many of us back then, we were working to change the public image of who we were. We stressed that the only difference between "us" and "them" was that we wanted to be with, to love and be loved by someone of the same sex.

In 1972 we invited a cross dresser from the mid-west named Virginia Prince to a Kalos meeting to talk about her experiences. One thing that stands out in my mind is a statement that she made at that talk. She said that cross dressers didn't want to be hiding behind homosexuality, which she likened to hiding behind a tree. "We want to be able to face people for who we are, a men who likes to dress in a house dress, not overly dressed, she added". You see, Virginia wasn't gay, she was a married man with a son, a straight man who felt comfortable wearing women's clothes. And she wanted to take responsibility for who she was.

Gay men want to love, be loved by and have sexual relations with men. Lesbians want the same from another women. Leather queens or drag queens can be gay or straight and in my mind that does not have anything to do with gay liberation.