Hidden Figures: Laudable Lies

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20th Century America, Civil Rights Movement, Dorothy Vaughan, Hidden Figures, Janelle Monáe, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, NASA, Octavia Spencer, Racial Issues, Taraji P Henson, The 1960s

I know that I promised my next post would be with the historical consultant for The Eagle. But I just saw Hidden Figures (2016, dir. Theodore Melfi, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly) and I really wanted to get my thoughts about it down in blog form. So I promise I’ll get to the interview in my next post.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning on seeing this movie, you may want to put off reading this, since I talk about major plot points.

Hidden Figures tells the fascinating story of three African-American women who worked at NASA in the 1960s. All three were originally hired to work as ‘computers’, women who did the low-status work of laborious mathematical calculating and double-checking the work of higher status male scientists in the era before the birth of electronic computers. Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) is a mathematician whose calculations proved invaluable to the launch of the Atlas rocket that made John Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth. Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) is the head of the ‘Western’ Computing group, a group of African-American female computers kept separate from the ‘Eastern’ Computing group, who were white women; realizing that her job will eventually be made obsolete by the arrival of an IBM computer, Vaughan teaches herself Fortran and becomes an expert in computers. Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) pursues her ambition of being an engineer for NASA.

All three women encounter racist obstacles at NASA. Johnson struggles with the fact that the only bathroom African-American women can use is located literally half a mile away on the Langley campus where she works, forcing her to take extended breaks simply to use the bathroom and thereby drawing the ire of the division head Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). Vaughan is long overdue for a promotion; she has been acting as the supervisor of the Western Computing group, but hasn’t been given the title or the pay of a supervisor, and the woman she reports to, Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst) doesn’t seem to care. Jackson needs to take night classes in order to apply for the engineering position, but the only school that offers such classes is segregated, and she has to persuade a judge to allow her to attend the classes.

Monáe, Henson, and Spencer

Ultimately, all three overcome their obstacles. Johnson repeatedly demonstrates her invaluableness to Harrison, who increasingly bends the rules to allow her to participate in the work of getting Glenn safely into space and back. Vaughan masters the newly-installed IBM computer before anyone else, and then teaches the other members of the Western Computing group how to work with it, thus saving all of their jobs and giving them a future on the cutting edge of computer science. This convinces Mitchell to arrange Vaughn’s over-due promotion. Jackson persuades the judge to let her attend the night school classes she needs and by the end of the film is on her way to becoming an engineer.

The story is well-told all around. The script is funny and does a good job of making the mathematical problems of early space flight intelligible to a general audience. The performances are all solid, especially Henson’s. And the costume designer does a very subtle job of highlighting the exclusion of African-American women from NASA; the white men tend to vanish into a sea of identical white dress shirts and dark ties, while the black women stand out in demur but colorful skirts and blouses, highlighting the absence of ‘colored’ people whenever they’re not around.

Katherine Johnson

The story it tells is an important one. These three women all played important roles at NASA and made major contributions to American space exploration for several decades. Their story deserves to be told, and it’s exciting to see the movie do so amazingly well at the box office. All too often, American history is presented as the accomplishments of white men, and Hidden Figures does a good job of reminding us that women of color have made great contributions to the country as well. It’s particularly nice to see a biopic about African-Americans who aren’t entertainers or athletes. These women are important not because they’re pretty or can sing, but because they’re smart. And the film confronts the problems of segregation head-on, particularly in Johnson and Jackson’s storylines. Americans need a reminder of just how ugly and unjust segregation and Jim Crow were.

The problem with the film is that in the pursuit of its goal of highlighting the struggles these three women had with segregation and racism, it significantly misrepresents what was going on at NASA in the 60s.

NACA and NASA

The organization we think of NASA began life in 1915 as NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. It existed until 1958, when it was shut down and replaced with NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NACA began hiring African-Americans to work as computers already in 1941, but like many branches of the American government in the period, NACA was segregated. It had a system of bathrooms, cafeterias, and other facilities for whites, and less well-maintained parallels for blacks.

Henson as Johnson solving a problem involving the space capsule

However, when NASA was formed in 1958, it wasn’t segregated. For example, NASA abandoned the system of segregated bathrooms, even though many of its properties were carried over from NACA. The story about Johnson having to run back and forth between buildings to use the bathrooms is actually a story that Jackson told about NACA in the 1950s. In the film, Johnson has to make several bathroom trips, once in the rain, trying to do her calculating work on the toilet so as not to fall too far behind in her work. Finally, when she breaks down and complains to Harrison, Harrison angrily goes out and uses a crowbar to tear down the sign labelling a particular bathroom as being for colored women. It’s a great scene that produces cheers in the audience, but it’s simply untrue.

Similarly, Vaughan was denied the supervisory position she deserved for some time, but that was during the 1950s. By the time the film opens in 1961, Vaughan had already been a supervisor for 3 years. Jackson was offered a position in an engineering team and then had to find a way to get into those classes, whereas the film suggests that she is kept from applying for the position because Mitchell is somewhat racist and unwilling to bend on the rules. So far as I can determine, the film consistently projects the segregation of 1950s NACA half a decade backwards onto 1960s NASA.

NASA in the 1960s was actually a tool for desegregation. Already when he was the Senate Majority leader, Lyndon Johnson saw NASA as a way to advance African Americans by hiring and promoting them into better-paying and more respectable positions. It’s no coincidence that NASA desegregated in 1958; Johnson was the head of the subcommittee that oversaw the passage of government act that created the agency.

Morgan Watson, NASA’s first black engineer

Katherine Johnson herself denied experiencing the treatment the film shows her receiving. “I didn’t feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research…You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job…and play bridge at lunch. I didn’t feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn’t feel it.” Likewise, Jackson only recalled one instance in which she felt disrespected, and the man involved subsequently apologized when he realized that he was in the wrong.

So by painting early 1960s NASA as a strongly segregated environment, the film is somewhat unfairly tarring NASA for NACA’s failings, and denying NASA’s modest role in helping advance the interests of African-Americans. The real racism that the women experienced in this period seems to have been from the communities around Langley. Vaughn had difficulties find a place to stay. In the 1960s, many of the black male engineers encountered threats and violence from the white locals, and one white NASA employee was so badly injured and threatened that he left NASA entirely. Had it chosen to, the film could have made its point more honestly by contrasting the comparatively accepting environment of NASA with the much more racist environment beyond its gates.

Racism or Sexism?

The more I think about the film and read about the background, the more I find myself thinking that the real problem Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson experienced wasn’t so much racism (although they clearly did encounter some of that) but sexism. Consistently, there is a pattern of the men doing the important, high-status work (such as figuring out the physics of space flight and designing the capsules) while the women (both black and white) are relegated to the low-status work of computing, even though the film makes clear that doing so is a waste of their talents, especially Johnson’s. Apart from Johnson, the only other woman in the Space Task group, Ruth, appears to be a secretary, and there are no women at all in the engineering group that Jackson is involved in.

Dorothy Vaughan

Johnson repeatedly insists that she needs to be involved in the key meetings where decisions are made, because excluding her means that she has to wait to get the data she needs, which often renders her work obsolete by the time she’s finished it. She persuades Harrison to bend the rules for her to sit in on briefings with the Air Force, and eventually he invites her into Mission Control when Glenn’s flight happens (a decision that the film claims probably saved Glenn’s life). The issue here is not that she’s African-American, but that she’s a woman and the men around her are uncomfortable with her presence.

While the film suggests that the white computers earned more than the black computers, the truth is that the two groups were paid the same, but that their pay was 40% less than the equivalent male pay, even during the NACA period.

So I think that the real problem with the film, at least for me, is that it was trying too hard to make its point about segregation, a point it could only make by misrepresenting the degree of segregation at NASA. Instead, the real story in the material seems to be the way that NASA was excluding women of talent from important roles. Their obstacles were clearly intersectional, involving both their race and their gender, but the film discourages us from thinking too much about gender by highlighting a simultaneous divide of gender and race; the scientists and engineers are all white men and the computers almost entirely black women (the exception being Vivian, who leads the white female computers, but who is never shown making any intellectual contributions to the project and who mostly acts as an administrative obstacle to Vaughn). The result is that whenever gender emerges as an issue, race is almost always there at the same time. There is one scene when Johnson’s future husband (an African-American) makes a sexist remark, but that’s almost the only moment when gender is highlighted as an issue. So the film tends to subsume gender issues under race issues in a way that makes it hard for the audience to see the gender component of the problem.

None of this makes Hidden Figures a bad movie, merely a movie that privileges its message over the facts. It tells an important story that people need to know. I just wish it had been a bit more honest with the facts.

(I feel a need to point out that I’m not a specialist in either American history or NASA history. I’m basing my comments on information I’ve been able to dig up online, and it’s possible that I’ve missed evidence that NASA was a more segregated environment than I realize. I’m certainly not suggesting that NASA was magically free of racism in the 1960s. It clearly wasn’t. I’m sure that these women encountered many obstacles due to their race, but they weren’t the specific obstacles the film offers.)

 

Correction: An earlier version of this post described John Glenn as the first American in space. I should have written that he was the first American to orbit the Earth, since Alan Shepherd and Gus Grissom both flew high enough to be in what is defined as space prior to Glenn’s flight, but neither of them achieved orbit. I regret the mistake. Thanks to T Rosenzveig for catching it!

Special Note: If you got to this post because some racist shitstain posted a link here in a rant about how the women depicted in this film made everything up, let me clarify the post. These women were not liars. Most of the racism they ran into in the film actually happened. It just didn’t happen in the 1960s under NASA; it happened a decade earlier under NACA. It was the film-makers, not the women, who misrepresented what happened when, in order to make a more dramatic movie. The problems they ran into in the 60s had more to do with ideas about gender than ideas about race. I absolutely 100% support the goal of abolishing racism, and I think it’s wonderful that this movie looks at the vital contributions a trio of little-known black women made to one of America’s greatest technological triumphs, because I think every white person in this country should understand that black scientists have made major contributions to America. So if you got here hoping to read some racist bullshit takedown of this movie, fuck off. You’re not welcome here.

 

Want to Know More?

Hidden Figures is still in the theaters, so it’s not available on Amazon. However, if you want to do some reading about these women, their story is told in Hidden Figures, by Mary Lee Shetterly. Another book about them is Sue Bradford Edwards’ Hidden Human Computers. Richard Paul and Steven Moss’s We Could Not Fail discusses the history of African-Americans in the space program.

Finally, you could look at Steven Moss’s unpublished master’s thesis, NASA and Racial Equality in the South, 1961-1968, which is available online.

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Stonewall: Strange But True

Tags

20th Century America, Ed Murphy, Homosexuality, New York City, Seymour Pine, Stonewall, Stonewall Riots, The 1960s

There is a subplot in Stonewall (2015, dir. Roland Emmerich) that revolves around the activities of the nefarious Ed ‘the Skull’ Murphy (Ron Perlman), a mysterious but threatening figure who seems to basically run the bar. This subplot reads like a ludicrous invention, an effort to shoehorn more drama into the riot, as if Emmerich thinks the riot itself isn’t enough of a reason for the audience to care. But, surprisingly, a substantial portion of the subplot is true. Ed Murphy’s life story is probably the most wildly improbable thing about the actual Stonewall Riots.

 

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning on seeing this film in the theater, you may wish to put off reading this until after you’ve done so, because I discuss a variety of major plot points.

When Seymour Pine (Matt Craven) raids the Stonewall Inn for the first time in the film, early in the week, he takes Ray (Jonny Beauchamp) into custody and questions him about the death of a street youth that he knows, but he denies knowing anything. Later in the film, it emerges that Murphy is running a prostitution ring in which street youth are kidnapped, pimped out, and then apparently murdered. Danny (Jeremy Irvine) gets kidnapped and is forced to turn a trick at a hotel. Initially he thinks his client is an older but conventionally dressed man, but after that man disappears into a bedroom, another older man, Jay, emerges, grotesquely dressed as a woman and starts to initiate sex. But Ray pulls a fire alarm and rescues Danny. They concoct a scheme to confront Murphy, who is in the process of assaulting them when Pine launches his second fateful raid on the Stonewall. So as the movie frames it, Pine was really trying to get evidence of connect Murphy to the killing of the street youth. There’s also some not-clearly explained stuff about missing bonds that Pine thinks might be connected to the Stonewall.

Perlman as Murphy

There are serious problems with the subplot. As I said, it feels too pat, like it’s pure invention. The film completely drops the subplot once the riot starts, except for an epilogue text mentioning Murphy, so the plot never gets resolved in any fashion. Ray and Danny are fictional characters, so their whole part of the plot is untrue. And the scene with Danny in the hotel room, in which Jay the creepy drag queen attempts to have sex with him, is down-right offensive, since sex with an elderly drag queen is presented as a terrible peril that Ray narrowly rescues our beautiful young protagonist from. Danny has already started turning tricks, so the terrible thing about the sex is not the unwilling-sex-for-money element but the fact that the client is repulsive. (One reviewer apparently got the sense that Danny thinks the transvestite is the person who killed the street youth, but I don’t recall anything in the film to suggest that.)

As I said in the first part of my review, the whole scene borders on transphobia (the only reason I say ‘borders on’ is that Danny is being coerced into this, so that there’s an argument to be made that the lack of consent is supposed to be the awful element of the scene). But when Jay comes out of the bedroom, the camera lingers on his swollen ankle in a woman’s shoe and on the garish lipstick he’s wearing, and he literally crawls up Danny’s body, like that dead girl who climbs out of tv sets in The Ring. It’s awful drag, and Jay seems to think he’s passing as a woman when he’s clearly a man. While the protests of the trans community that they are being written out of the story of the Stonewall riots are basically unfounded, this scene pretty much justifies the trans community’s anger against the whole film.

But once we subtract Ray and Danny from this subplot, the rest of it is, surprisingly, based in fact.

The Improbable Life of Ed Murphy

Murphy grew up in Depression-era Manhattan where he was a problem child. He was expelled from a Catholic grammar school and later got sent to a reform school for assaulting a policeman with a milk bottle. After briefly working in a gay bar run by the Jewish mafia, Murphy fought in France in World War II. His post-war career included stints working as the doorman for gay bars, burglarizing dentist’s offices for dental gold, a ten-year term in prison noted for the numerous fights he got into, and finally a stint as a professional wrestler. During his wrestling career, he took to shaving his head and adopted the nickname “The Skull”. His signature move was a head-butt, and he was famous for throwing chairs at fans who booed him. (However, he’s not to be confused with his contemporary, pro wrestler Mike “Skull” Murphy.)

He eventually got a job as a house detective at the New York Hilton, doing discrete security work. And it’s here that his story gets weird. Murphy became involved in a remarkably elaborate prostitution and blackmail ring that operated across the whole country. The ring recruited young, often homeless men, known in gay parlance as ‘chickens’, and used them to turn tricks at the Hilton or sometimes another hotel. Once the hustler got a client into a room, one of two things would happen. Sometimes the chicken would steal the victim’s wallet and leave. They kept the money but turned the contents of the wallet over the ring, who would use the driver’s license and other information to begin blackmailing the victim. In the other scenario, Murphy or other members of the ring would break into the room, posing as members of the Vice Squad. They would threaten to arrest the man, but agree to let him go if the man paid them a “fine” or “bail money”. New York vice cops were notoriously corrupt and bribable in the 1950s and 60s, so the scheme relied on the terrible reputation of the real police to add verisimilitude to the con.

What is truly astounding about this whole scheme is the extraordinary lengths they went to. Sometimes they put the ‘arrested’ victim into a room with a second supposed victim who would then encourage the victim to pay up by talking about how bad it would be if he was outed as homosexual. The fake cops sometimes used real guns, real police badges, and fake copies of actual police paperwork such as arrest warrants. Sometimes they took the victim down to a police precinct and pretended to go inside to “speak with the duty captain” while the victim was held outside in a car by another member of the ring. Sometimes they took the victim into night court and sat in the back of the courtroom while one member would go and chat with the court clerk. In one case, a member of the ring actually tricked a desk officer into putting the victim into a holding cell for a while.

The whole purpose of these elaborate charades was to get the victim to agree to pay up. Once the victim did, the ring drove him to his bank (waiting with him until it opened, if need be) so he could take money out; sometimes they actually waited in line with him. In some cases, they literally had the victim empty his bank account, demanding sums so large the withdrawal required special authorization from a supervisor.

But the demands often didn’t end that day. The ring frequently continued to blackmail its victims long afterward. Sometimes they called the victim pretending to be a reporter who was writing a story about their arrest, to remind him about the risk of exposure. Occasionally, members flew across the country to press a victim for more money, and once went as far as London. In one remarkable incident, they confronted a nuclear scientist at a secure government research facility. The frightened scientist passed them off as personal friends and wound up giving them a tour of the top-secret facilities when a supervisor entered the room. Even more brazenly, when the ring snared a New Jersey congressman, on two occasions they escorted him out of his office on Capitol Hill and flew him by private plane to a New Jersey bank to make a pay-off. They escorted a surgeon out of an operation to make a payment, and escorted an admiral out of the Pentagon. In all, the ring is estimated to have garnered more than $2 million, a colossal sum of money for the period.

This blackmail ring nabbed more than just a New Jersey congressman. Their victims included two generals, a decorated Navy pilot, a reportedly well-known British film producer, an Ivy League professor, the head of the American Medical Association, and several reportedly well-known actors, singers, and other performers. They are thought to have snared famous pianist Liberace at one point. Another victim, Admiral William Church, committed suicide after years of pay-offs when the actual police investigating the ring tried to interview him.

Exactly what role Murphy played in the prostitution scam is unclear. Some have said he was one of its ringleaders, while Murphy later claimed that he joined the ring to act as a police spy, and records suggest he was arrested during the investigation and gave evidence to avoid a jail sentence.

Murphy’s mug shot

When the real police finally learned of the scheme and brought the members of the ring to trial in 1965, the whole thing became a national scandal. The detective supervising the case actually treated the targets as victims rather than as criminals, a surprisingly progressive choice given the way homosexuals were treated in the post-war period. Pressure from the Mattachine Society in the wake of the scandal led the NYPD to end the entrapment operations that made this scheme so plausible.

But That’s Not All

After dodging jail time for his involvement in this scam, Murphy went on to become the door manager of the Stonewall Inn. Historian David Carter thinks that Murphy may have run a prostitution network out of the upper floor of the Stonewall, although he doesn’t explore it much in his book on Stonewall, perhaps because at this remove there simply aren’t many people left who know much about it. Certainly the New York Mafia ran prostitution rings that provided chickens to wealth gay men, including clients such as Liberace, Malcolm Forbes, Cardinal Spellman, and reportedly a vice-president.

The Stonewall Inn claimed to be a private club that required memberships. Those who wanted entrance had to sign a book. Smart patrons used fake names, but lots of others used their real names. Murphy combined that information with information that the bartenders had pumped from patrons to start blackmailing gay Wall Street bankers.

According to Seymour Pine (who, incidentally, literally wrote the US Army’s handbook on hand-to-hand combat), the thing that actually led to the raid on the Stonewall was not simply its status as a gay bar, but rather a report that negotiable security bonds had vanished from Manhattan brokerage houses and turned up for sale in Europe. A theory emerged that the bonds were stolen by a gay banker who was being blackmailed by the mob, and the activities at the Stonewall made it seem like it could be the center of the blackmail. So Pine claimed in later years that his true goal was to shut down a blackmail ring and not simply to harass the gay community.

Inspector Seymour Pine, about the time of the Stonewall Riots

Carter offers an even more interesting theory on top of these details. He points out that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was homosexual and probably in a relationship with Clyde Tolson, his assistant director at the FBI. By the late 1960s Hoover’s sexual interests were a widely whispered secret within the gay community; in fact, a 1968 publication, The Homosexual Handbook, actually outed Hoover by name, but was forced to remove the mention from a subsequent printing of the book. Hoover is rumored to have been a transvestite; although historians have dismissed the story as unsubstantiated, at least two witnesses have insisted that they saw Hoover dressed as a woman at parties at which Mafia-provided hustlers were present. At least one of these hustlers claims to have had a picture of himself with Hoover in drag, which he kept as a way to ensure his own safety from police harassment.

Seymour Pine later in life

From all of this, David Carter theorizes that Ed Murphy may have had compromising photos of Hoover that he used to keep Hoover off the Mafia’s back. He doesn’t have any direct proof of this, but given Murphy’s role in both prostitution and blackmail rings, it is an entirely plausible theory, and one newspaper source reported that one of the leaders of the Hilton prostitution scam had pictures of himself with Hoover, which may be a reference to Murphy, who claimed to have known Hoover.

Ed Murphy in 1978

And that brings me back to the offensive scene with the elderly transvestite. It fits what we know of Ed Murphy’s activities. Murphy was at one point rumored to have participated in the kidnapping of a street youth, Carter suspects he was running a prostitution ring, and he may have had a connection to Hoover.

And that’s why I think that Jay is supposed to be Hoover; Jeremy Irvine has broadly hinted at this. And note Hoover’s first initial.

But Wait! There’s More!

Murphy’s life had one last surprising twist to it. After a career as a petty criminal, soldier, doorman at gay bars, pro wrestler, pimp, blackmailer, and police informant, in the wake of the Stonewall Riots he fashioned an even more improbable identity for himself as a gay rights activist.

In 1972, he founded the Christopher Street Festival, timed to coincide with the growing Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade, and in 1974, he persuaded the parade’s organizing committee to reverse the direction of the parade, so that it would start at Central Park and end at Christopher Street. His motive for this was probably money, since if the parade ended at Christopher Street, all the bars and businesses there were likely to turn a nice profit, but he insisted in later life that of all the people running the Stonewall Inn, he was the only one who actually cared about gay rights. He took to calling himself the First Stonewaller and began riding in a float in the parade.

Ed Murphy in a Pride Parade

Over the course of the next two decades, Murphy became a highly respected activist, doing charity work for a variety of causes including homeless street youth, prostitutes, and the mentally handicapped. Whereas the street youth in Stonewall distrust Murphy, he was in fact beloved by the real street youth, who nicknamed him ‘Mother’. When the AIDS crisis developed Murphy championed that issue as well. In 1978, he formally came out as gay and led a march in support of an anti-discrimination bill for New York City. He acted as a witness against mafia figures who controlled the gay bars, and decried the police corruption of the 1960 by which gay bars paid off the police to be notified when raids were coming; he claimed that the police had been paid off literally hours before the second Stonewall raid. By the end of his life, he had become known as the Mayor of Christopher Street (although he’s not the only figure that title has been applied to, since Marsha P. Johnson was another candidate for that honor). When he died of AIDS in 1989, he received a standing-room only funeral and was posthumously named Grand Marshall of what was by that point the Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade.

So the Stonewall Riots weren’t just transformative for the gay community in New York City. They also apparently gave Murphy an opportunity to redeem himself for the way he had preyed on the gay community earlier in his life. It’s a pity that the film couldn’t make his sub-plot more satisfying, because he was much more fascinating person than the film suggests.

Want to Know More?

The movie is not available yet, since it’s still in theaters.

If you want to read more about Stonewall, seriously, get David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. It’s an excellent piece of scholarship and highly readable.

Stonewall: There’s Got to be a Morning After

Tags

20th Century America, Christopher Street Liberation Day, Dick Leitsch, Gay Activists Alliance, Gay Liberation Front, Homosexuality, Mattachine Society, New York City, Roland Emmerich, Stonewall, Stonewall Riots, Sylvia Rivera, The 1960s

In my previous post, I explored all the rioting that Stonewall (2015, dir. Roland Emmerich) left out. In this post, I want to talk about something else the film left out, namely almost everything that followed the riots. The riots themselves aren’t really what matters. What matters is how the riots changed the gay community in the year that followed. In the movie, after the riots, the film jumps ahead to Danny (Jeremy Irvine) returning home to visit his former lover and his way more interesting kid sister. And then he goes back to New York City, bumps into the street youth including Ray (Jonny Beauchamp) and then participates in a huge march to Central Park. The viewer is left to figure out for him or herself how the riots produced the parade.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning on seeing this film in the theater, you may wish to put off reading this until after you’ve done so, because I discuss a variety of major plot points.

Prior to the riots, the gay community existed mostly underground. Gays, lesbians, and trans people tended to meet furtively, in the few bars that would tolerate their presence. Gay men congregated in parks, back alleyways, and in places that were generally deserted at night, like docks and warehouse districts, looking for anonymous sex. There were a few public organizations, such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, that had enjoyed modest success in pushing for limited legal rights for gays and lesbians, and a few gays had dared to appear on television and radio shows. But that was as far as organization went.

The riots changed that dramatically. Just a few days after the riots, a leaflet began to circulate that read “Are The Homosexuals Revolting? You Bet Your Sweet Ass We Are” and announced the formation of group to further this revolution. Dick Leitsch, president of the New York branch of the Mattachine Society, wrote an account of his experience during the Riots, titled “The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World” (‘dropping a hairpin’ being gay slang for hinting about being gay), and circulated it widely within the gay community.

When the Mattachine Society held a meeting on July 9^th, not even two weeks after the raid on the Stonewall Inn, more than 100 people attended. More than 200 attended another meeting the next week. While Leitsch struggled to control the meeting and tried to emphasize the Mattachine’s strategy of respectable protest, the street youth who attended the meeting would have none of it, insisting on a more confrontational approach. On July 30^th, about 500 gays, lesbians, and trans people marched from Washington Square Park to the Stonewall, shouting “Gay Power!” In the months to come, this more militant approach tended to displace the Mattachine Society’s more respectful strategy toward fighting for gay rights.

Over the next several months, numerous groups were formed to demand rights for gays and lesbians. The Gay Liberation Front began hosting dance parties where gays and lesbians could dance without having to give money to the Mafia. The simple right to congregate and dance was tremendously important to them; when a lesbian was punched in the face by a staffer at a Mafia-controlled bar for refusing to stop dancing with another woman, the GLF organized a dance-in at the bar and refused to be intimidated by the owners.

Come Out, the newspaper of the GLF

In general, the GLF was the most in-your-face of these new groups. They actively sought confrontation with straights. When the Village Voice refused to run ads containing the word ‘gay’, the GLF protested with a large crowd outside its office (which, as I mentioned in my previous post, was across the street from the Stonewall) and got it to change its policy. The GLF also began confronting politicians at public meetings and candidates forums. They launched a newspaper, set up a bail fund, and began organizing to feed the street youth.

But the militancy and fractious nature of the GLF also alienated some gays and lesbians, who organized the Gay Activists Alliance in response. The GAA focused on forging a sense of gay and lesbian identity and refused to get sidetracked with other political causes the way the GLF frequently did. They demanded a meeting with Mayor Lindsey’s administration, and actually got one, although it was with an advisor who promptly ignored their demands. The GAA adopted the Greek letter Lambda as their logo, creating a symbol that continues to be used long after the GAA has disbanded.

The GAA marching in a parade

In late February of 1970, Seymour Pine, who had led the raid on the Stonewall, similarly raided the Snake Pit, another Mafia-owned bar that catered to homosexuals. When the patrons began to congregate outside, Pine feared a repeat of the rioting, and arrested 167 people and took them down to the Sixth Precinct. One of the patrons, an Argentinean named Diego Vinales, leapt from a second floor window  of the precinct building and was impaled on the spikes of the fence outside.

Vinales survived, and was eventually cut loose from the fence and taken to a hospital, but word began to spread that he was dead or dying, and the crowd inside the precinct became angry and turned the arrests into a spontaneous sit-in. In the confusion, several gays slipped into the police chief’s office and used his phones to alert the media, both mainstream and the new gay newspapers, and the GAA.

Later that day, a crowd of 500 gathered in front of the Stonewall to protest and marched to the Sixth Precinct. It eventually marched to Vinales’ hospital to hold a vigil. The fact that such a crowd could be raised so quickly showed just how far the movement had come in barely more than half a year.

Congressman Ed Koch wrote to the police commissioner demanding to know why Pine had violated the commissioner’s promise to not entrap or harass gays and lesbians. He became the first elected official to speak up for homosexuals, and his willingness to align himself with the gay community was a factor in his eventual election to the mayor’s office. In May, the GAA badgered Carol Greitzer, a city councilwoman, into agreeing to sponsor a bill banning job discrimination against homosexuals. Sylvia Rivera, a truly fearless transwoman, claimed that she hit Greitzer over the head with the petition in support of the bill.

Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson founded the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, or STAR, dedicated to helping what would eventually come to be called trans people, and established Star House, a shelter for street youth. (Sadly, the considerable efforts of trans men and women to support gay liberation ran into enormous resistance from gays and particularly lesbians, who often derided trans women as “female impersonators”. As a result, when a bill banning job discrimination did finally get passed in 1986, all mention of trans people had been removed. The hostility Rivera encountered eventually led her to leave New York City and abandon activism for two decades.)

Trans activist Sylvia Rivera

Vinales’ accident, and the publicity it received in the traditional media, helped shift public opinion against police raids and in favor of fully-legal gay bars, with the result that gay bars began to proliferate in the next few years. The Stonewall Inn, however, closed about three months after the riots. It had drawn too much attention for the Mafia to feel comfortable with it, and its owner, Fat Tony, was murdered, perhaps because of his tendency to talk too much when he was high.

Craig Rodwell pushed for an event to commemorate the Stonewall Riots, and on June 28^th, 1970, the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march took place. About 20 groups were represented and what started as several hundred people marching from Christopher Street to Central Park had swelled to several thousand by the time the march reached its destination. A few years later, the annual parade reversed its route so that the party at the end benefitted the businesses along Christopher Street. The Christopher Street Liberation Day parade eventually turned into a Gay Pride Parade and inspired countless similar parades annually around the world. Germany’s main pride event is still called Christopher Street Day.

The first Gay Pride parade, Christopher Street Liberation Day

So in that sense, it is possible to trace a straight line from the Stonewall Riots down to contemporary Gay Pride events, still usually held in June in honor of the Stonewall Riots, although many younger gays, lesbians, and trans people no longer realize that Gay Pride is actually a commemoration of that event. Indeed, many worry today that Pride Parades are simply becoming a new way for corporations to market goods to gays and lesbians.

It’s a shame that Emmerich chose to skip over everything that happened between the Stonewall Riots and the Christopher Street Liberation Day parade a year later, because that year saw the unleashing of an enormous tide of energy, enthusiasm, protest, anger, and organizing. Reading about all those events, arguments, and organizational work makes me a little envious of those who lived through that heady period, although I’m deeply grateful that I get to live with the fruits of their decades-long struggle rather than having to put up with the considerable social stigma, discrimination, and violence that those earlier activists encountered. One activist commented just a few days after Stonewall, “All I know is I’ve only been in this movement three days, and I’ve been beaten up three times!” (Carter, Stonewall, p. 213).

A Brazilian Gay Pride event

The film offers a far simpler narrative, in which the riots just magically give birth to a parade a year later, instead of acknowledging the parade as a piece of strategic planning by Rodwell, who realized that commemorating the riots would help build a gay identity and a sense of history for a people who, at the time, were perceived as having no history. The story of Danny Winter, budding gay rights activist working in post-Stonewall New York City would have been a much more interesting story than the one Emmerich chose to give us. I suppose now I’m just complaining that Emmerich didn’t film the movie I would like to see, but if you’re going to totally make up someone to drop into an historical event, wouldn’t you want to focus his story on the interesting stuff?

Want to Know More?

The movie is not available yet, since it’s still in theaters.

If you want to read more about Stonewall, a good place to start is David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. It’s an excellent piece of scholarship and highly readable.

Stonewall: Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting

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20th Century America, Craig Rodwell, Homosexuality, Mattachine Society, New York City, Stonewall, Stonewall Riots, The 1960s

In my previous post, I discussed the first night of the 1969 Stonewall Riots and how they are depicted in Stonewall (2015, dir. Roland Emmerich). After the riot scene, the film jumps forward a year, and shows its hero, Danny Winter (Jeremy Irvine) returning to his family home in small-town Indiana, in search of the quarterback he’s still in love with for some reason. That creates the impression that the Stonewall Riots lasted only a single night, Friday the 27^th. In reality, the police raid on Friday night touched off six nights of clashes between the police and protestors. So instead of devoting so much screen time to Danny’s tedious back story, which could probably have been explained in 4 lines of dialog and perhaps some attempts to call home, the film should have explored the reasons why Friday night wasn’t the end of the matter.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning on seeing this film in the theater, you may wish to put off reading this until after you’ve done so, because I discuss a variety of major plot points.

Saturday Night: The Biggest Riot

While it’s understandable that Emmerich decided to concentrate on the most famous night of the conflict, it’s an unfortunate oversimplification, because the Friday night riot was not in fact the biggest one. The crowd Friday night has been estimated to be 4-500 people in size, which means it was only the third largest night. Over the course of Saturday afternoon, as word about the previous night’s events spread, people began going down to Christopher Street to see the damage for themselves. The result was a slowly growing crowd of street youths, gays, lesbians, hippies, and even a few tourists that by 9pm had come to number 2-3000. The crowd began singing, chanting, and shouting slogans like “Gay power!” and “Christopher Street belongs to the Queens!” A few activists from the Mattachine Society and Craig Rodwell, a very important activist at the time who had broken with Mattachine over its cautiousness, handed out fliers. Members of the crowd began kissing each other, a truly radical gesture that horrified some of the older, more closeted gays who had shown up. The general mood was one of anger mixed with pride at the previous night’s events. The police kept trying to disperse the crowd, and the Stonewall Inn’s owners sought to draw people in to the re-opened bar.

The size of the crowd was probably a combination of curiosity about how much damage had been down, anger over a dramatic incident of police harassment (this was, in fact, the second raid on the Stonewall in one week), and surprise and curiosity about how a community perceived as lacking in masculinity and the ability to fight back had managed to hold the riot police at bay for so long.

A group of street youth posing on the second night of riots

The hotness of the evening began to raise tempers and at some point around perhaps 10pm, the crowd decided to block the street to vehicles. Cars and buses that tried to get through the crowd were harassed. The only casualty of the whole riots happened when a taxi driver became so terrified that he had a fatal heart attack. The crowd began to throw bottles and garbage at the police, and the trash cans were lit on the fire, something that happened frequently during the riots. Not too far away stood the House of Detention, New York’s women’s prison, and the inmates (who included Afeni Shakur, future rapper Tupak Shakur’s mother) began to light toilet paper on fire and throw it out the window to express solidarity.

Marsha P. Johnson, one of the leaders on the previous night, climbed a lamppost (in a dress and high heels, no less) and dropped a bag containing a large heavy object into the windshield of a police car. The officers in the car grabbed the nearest person, who wasn’t a protester, pulled him into the car and drove off, beating their hapless prisoner. In another incident, a group of six policemen began to savagely beat a street youth who had not done anything, but around 50 Queens attacked them, rescued the boy, and allowed themselves to be beaten rather than turn him over to the police.

When the crowd attacked another police car with a cinder block, the police radioed for help. For the next several hours, approximately 100 officers struggled to deal with the crowd. Around 2:15am, 150 riot police showed up to provide assistance. Unlike the first night’s riot police, this group was equipped with riot shields and marched down Christopher Street in a tight phalanx, forcing the crowd to retreat. The street youth responded the way they had the night before, with a Rockettes-style kick line. The result was initially much as it had been the night before. The street youth made good use of the peculiar street plan, which involved short blocks and streets meeting at odd angles, to thwart police efforts to drive them off. When they were pushed out of one block, they simply ran down the street, around the corner, and came at the police from a different direction.

A map of the confused Greenwich Village streets around the Stonewall

Unlike the previous night, however, the police successfully occupied the block of Christopher Street that houses the Stonewall. But they were unable to force the protesters out of the surrounding streets. In one incident, two police officers chased a crowd of more than 100 protestors down a street, until the crowd realized how badly it outnumbered the police. Suddenly it was the police officers who had to flee from the crowd, which was shouting  “Catch them! Fuck them!”  It was not until 3:30am that the police succeeded in fully restoring order.

Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday: Things Quiet Down

The following three nights, the police modified their strategy. On Sunday, the police realized that they had to show up with large forces very early in the evening and prevent crowds to forming. The Mattachine Society posted a public notice at the Stonewall Inn calling for peace and quiet, whereas Rodwell sought to continue the protests to maximize their impact. The result was that the protests were smaller and more dispersed. One group of street youth took advantage of the heavy police presence on Christopher Street to go down to the Sixth Precinct and plaster both police cars and the private cars of officers with “Equality for Homosexuals” bumper stickers.

The notice posted by the Mattachine Society in the window of the Stonewall

The Stonewall stayed open and in what might be a rare example of genuine historical irony, the police actually encouraged people to go into it. Poet Allen Ginsberg stopped by Stonewall and danced with the street youth. He famously remarked, “You know, the guys there were so beautiful—they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.”

Monday and Tuesday night were relatively quiet. The police continued their strategy of preventing crowds from forming, and rain and the fact that it was a workday depressed turnout. But the police became increasingly confrontational, perhaps to restore their wounded pride. Many officers shouted insults at gays, and one man was arrested purely for talking back to a belligerent officer. On Tuesday night, a police officer was mobbed while beating a protester, and his badge was stolen. It was found the next night, hanging from a tree on a string of pickled pigs’ feet.

Wednesday: The Last Night of Rioting

But on Wednesday, things heated up again. The Village Voice, which despite being a liberal newspaper was deeply anti-gay in this period, made the mistake of publishing two articles on the riots, which happened literally across the street from their offices. The articles were peppered with phrases like ‘limp wrists”, “the Sunday fag follies”, “dancing faggots”, and “the forces of faggotry”. The two articles infuriated the gay community, and a crowd of between 500 and 1000 people descended on the building and argued about whether to burn it down.

A photo from the sixth night of the riots

Additionally, by this point, word about the riots had spread through the leftist community in the city, and large numbers of Black Panthers, Yippies, and other radicals came down to Christopher Street looking to fight the police. They understood that the gays had somehow been able to defeat the police on the first two nights and wanted to participate in that. The Rev Irene Monroe, a middle-schooler at the time, says that a large group of blacks came in from Brooklyn on the first night of the riots trying to find a member of their community who was known to frequent the Stonewall, but the only night that David Carter reports a large group of heterosexual black protesters appearing is Wednesday, so it’s possible her memory of the date is wrong. The raid on the Stonewall didn’t happen until 1:20am, and the violence didn’t start for some time after that, so it unlikely the word of the rioting reached anyone in the wider NYC area much before 2am, and it seems curious to me that a middle-schooler would have been allowed to roam the city so late at night. But on later nights the protests started much earlier.

The crowd by this point was seriously angry, and Wednesday’s riot lacked the half-camp ridicule of the first two nights. This night appears to have been the most violent. A number of gay-friendly shops were looted, presumably by non-locals who didn’t know which businesses had a history of being gay-friendly or exploiting gays. Dick Leitsch, the president of the Mattachine Society, described seeing the extent of the injuries suffered by the street youth. “7^th Avenue from Christopher to West 10^th looked like Vietnam. Young people, many of them queens, were lying on the sidewalk, bleeding from the head, face, mouth, and even the eyes. Others were nursing bruised and often bleeding arms, legs, backs, and necks….The exploiters had moved in…blacks and students who want a revolution, any kind of revolution …swelled the crowd…but ‘graciously’ let the queens take all the bruises and suffer all the arrests.” (Carter, Stonewall, p. 204) Unlike previous nights, the violence that night ended quickly, in about an hour.

A photo from the last night of the riots

Wednesday night was the last night of the riot. Protesters vowed to return, and police expected trouble because Thursday was the start of a four-day weekend for the 4^th of July, but although a large crowd of people appeared, there was little trouble.

Despite the violence and the size of the crowds, arrests were surprisingly few. On the first night, only 13 people were arrested (7 of them employees of the Stonewall), on the second night 4, and on the last night, only 5. A total of five officers are known to have been injured, including officers who sustained a broken wrist, a fractured leg, a serious cut under one eye, and a bite on the arm. Many protesters sustained broken ribs and arms, among the more serious injuries. A number of those arrested reported being beaten several hours later, down at the precinct.

Why did the protests go on for so many nights? The answer is clearly complex. Much of it was clearly pent-up frustration on the part of the gay community over how gays were treated by the police. Once the cat was out of the bag, the gay community clearly wanted to express its anger. The street youth played a large role in most nights of the protest, and in their case they may have been driven by their anger at their situation and a desire to extend the upside-down situation in which they momentarily felt a sense of power over the police. The riots began to subside on Sunday, due in part to the tactics of the police, but perhaps also because many of the initial protestors had been injured or decided that they had gotten away narrowly on the previous nights. The resurgence of the violence on Wednesday was clearly due to the inflammatory articles published by the Voice as well as the desire of outside groups to strike a blow against the police. But it’s also clear that the police gradually became more interested in inciting violence as a way to avenge their previous humiliations. Riots are rarely mono-causal events; a specific incident will trigger violence, but it takes a powder keg of anger, resentment, and perceived grievance to produce a substantial crowd willing to engage in multiple days of violence. That the violence was in considerable measure driven by a segment of the community normally perceived as passive and unwilling to resist speaks volumes about the depth of resentment gays felt.

Want to Know More?

The movie is not available yet, since it’s still in theaters.

If you want to read more about Stonewall, a good place to start is David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. It’s an excellent piece of scholarship and highly readable.