The Stonewall Riots, Drag Queens, and Judy Garland

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Toby Johnson's books:

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FINDING YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth of the Great Secret III

GAY SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness

GAY PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe

SECRET MATTER, a sci-fi novel with wonderful "aliens" with an Afterword by Mark Jordan

GETTING LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE:  A Fantastical Gay Romance set in two different time periods

THE FOURTH QUILL, a novel about attitudinal healing and the problem of evil

TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams




CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into Gold: GaySpirit in Storytelling, a collaboration with Steve Berman and some 30 other writers

THE MYTH OF THE GREAT SECRET: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell

IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD: A Mystical Journey

Unpublished manuscripts

About ordering

Books on Gay Spirituality:

White Crane Gay Spirituality Series

  Articles and Excerpts:

Review of Samuel Avery's The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness

Funny Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San Francisco"

About Liberty Books, the Lesbian/Gay Bookstore for Austin, 1986-1996

The Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate

A Bifurcation of Gay Spirituality

Why gay people should NOT Marry

The Scriptural Basis for Same Sex Marriage

Toby and Kip Get Married

Wedding Cake Liberation

Gay Marriage in Texas

What's ironic

Shame on the American People

The "highest form of love"

Gay Consciousness

Why homosexuality is a sin

The cause of homosexuality

The origins of homophobia

Q&A about Jungian ideas in gay consciousness

What is homosexuality?

What is Gay Spirituality?

My three messages

What Jesus said about Gay Rights

Queering religion

Common Experiences Unique to Gay Men

Is there a "uniquely gay perspective"?

The purpose of homosexuality

Interview on the Nature of Homosexuality

What the Bible Says about Homosexuality

Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men

Varieties of Gay Spirituality

Waves of Gay Liberation Activity

The Gay Succession

Wouldn’t You Like to Be Uranian?

The Reincarnation of Edward Carpenter

Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality as Artistic Medium

Easton Mountain Retreat Center

Andrew Harvey & Spiritual Activism

The Mysticism of Andrew Harvey

The upsidedown book on MSNBC

Enlightenment

"It's Always About You"

The myth of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara

Joseph Campbell's description of Avalokiteshvara

Gay Spirituality

Curious Bodies

What Toby Johnson Believes

The Joseph Campbell Connection

The Mann Ranch (& Rich Gabrielson)

Campbell & The Pre/Trans Fallacy

The Two Loves

The Nature of Religion

What's true about Religion

Being Gay is a Blessing

Drawing Long Straws

Freedom of Religion

The Gay Agenda

Gay Saintliness

Gay Spiritual Functions

The subtle workings of the spirit in gay men's lives.

The Sinfulness of Homosexuality

Proposal for a study of gay nondualism

Priestly Sexuality

Having a Church to Leave

Harold Cole on Beauty

Marian Doctrines: Immaculate Conception & Assumption

Not lashed to the prayer-post

Monastic or Chaste Homosexuality

Is It Time to Grow Up? Confronting the Aging Process

Notes on Licking  (July, 1984)

Redeem Orlando

Gay Consciousness changing the world by Shokti LoveStar

Alexander Renault interviews Toby Johnson

Mystical Vision

"The Evolution of Gay Identity"

"St. John of the Cross & the Dark Night of the Soul."

Avalokiteshvara at the Baths

 Eckhart's Eye

Let Me Tell You a Secret

Religious Articulations of the Secret

The Collective Unconscious

Driving as Spiritual Practice

Meditation

Historicity as Myth

Pilgrimage

No Stealing

Next Step in Evolution

The New Myth

The Moulting of the Holy Ghost

Gaia is a Bodhisattva

The Hero's Journey

The Hero's Journey as archetype -- GSV 2016

The  Gay Hero Journey (shortened)

You're On Your Own

Superheroes

Seeing Differently

Teenage Prostitution and the Nature of Evil

Allah Hu: "God is present here"

 
Adam and Steve

The Life is in the Blood

Gay retirement and the "freelance monastery"

Seeing with Different Eyes

Facing the Edge: AIDS as an occasion for spiritual wisdom

What are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?

The Vision

The mystical experience at the Servites'  Castle in Riverside

A  Most Remarkable Synchronicity in Riverside

The Great Dance according to C.S.Lewis

The Techniques Of The World Saviors

Part 1: Brer Rabbit and the Tar-Baby

Part 2: The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara

Part 3: Jesus and the Resurrection

Part 4: A Course in Miracles

The Secret of the Clear Light

Understanding the Clear Light

Mobius Strip

Finding Your Tiger Face

How Gay Souls Get Reincarnated

About Alien Abduction

In honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke

Karellen was a homosexual

The D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance

Intersections with the movie When We Rise

More about Gay Mental Health

Psych Tech Training

Toby at the California Institute

The Rainbow Flag

Ideas for gay mythic stories

People

Kip and Toby, Activists

Toby's friend and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.

Harry Hay, Founder of the gay movement

About Hay and The New Myth

About Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first man to really "come out"

About Michael Talbot, gay mystic

About Fr. Bernard Lynch

About Richard Baltzell

About Guy Mannheimer

About David Weyrauch

About Dennis Paddie

About Ask the Fire

About Arthur Evans

About Christopher Larkin

About Mark Thompson

About Sterling Houston

About Michael Stevens

The Alamo Business Council

Our friend Tom Nash

Second March on Washington

The Gay Spirituality Summit in May 2004 and the "Statement of Spirituality"

Book Reviews

Toby Johnson's Books on Gay Men's Spiritualities:

Gay Perspective

Things Our [Homo]sexuality
Tells Us about the
Nature of God and
the Universe

Gay Spirituality

Gay Identity and 
the Transformation of
Human Consciousness

Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling

edited by
Toby Johnson
& Steve Berman








Secret Matter

Lammy Award Winner for Gay Science Fiction

updated








Getting Life in Perspective

A Fantastical Romance

The Fourth Quill

originally published as PLAGUE

The Fourth Quill is available as an audiobook, narrated by Jimmie Moreland. Click here

Two Spirits: A Story of Life with the Navajo

with Walter L. Williams

Two Spirits  is available as an audiobook  narrated by Arthur Raymond. Click here

Finding Your Own True Myth:

The Myth of the Great Secret III









In Search of God  in the Sexual Underworld












The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell.

This was the second edition of this book.

Revolution through Consciousness Change

From my understanding of the event (based on my working with Toby Marotta on the book The Politics of Homosexuality which included an extensive account of Stonewall), what "empowered" the patrons at the Stonewall Inn and the passersby on the street who joined in was a general hippie/countercultural rejection of societal power structures (arising from the anti-war movement) AND, importantly, from a sense of numbers.

 

I think -- and I don't claim to be right, only to have an opinion -- that what could have happened earlier that day, Friday, June 27th, 1969, a great many men from the Village flocked to see Judy Garland's funeral at a upper Eastside funeral parlor at Madison Ave and 81st. What would have impressed them -- and in the early hours of the next day, mobilized them to join in the demonstrations to object to the police raid on the Stonewall Inn -- wasn't Garland's divahood (after all, it had been her downfall), but rather the number of other gay men they saw at the event. This was an event of popular culture; lots of people came out of curiosity. There would have been crowds of homosexuals recognizing each other on the street in front of the funeral parlor.

 

Garland's funeral might have been a sort of proto-gay pride event. And it demonstrated there was power in numbers -- that there was something "in the air" in those days as one anti-war mobilization after another demonstrated how many people were "anti-establishment."

 

The Stonewall Inn was a hippie bar. The "street queens" weren't politicos and they weren't "drag queens" in the sense of female impersonators or drag performers. (The bar was not particularly welcoming to true drag queens/female impersonators and, in fact, had a quota on the number the bouncer allowed in.) They were hippies in so-called "gender fuck drag." And they were likely high on pot or tripping on acid.

 

The Stonewall Inn, in fact, had been under attack by the fledging gay politicos of the time. About a year and a half earlier, Craig Rodwell (previous President of the Mattachine Society New York and founder of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop) had written an article for a MSNY newsletter called The Hymnal tracing a rash of Hepatitis A infections to the bar. It was believed by the proto-actvists with the Mattachine that the bar didn't wash glasses between uses. This lack of concern for the patrons' well-being was attributed to the bar's Mafia ownership.

During the Stonewall Riots, Craig Rodwell called out "Gay Power" and shifted the “police riot” into a political demonstration. (NY Times reminiscence) Because of Rodwell and other radicalized Mattachine members’ passing out flyers, the demonstrations continued over three nights, and the Gay Liberation Front was formed, mostly by the gay hippies in the Village. Including Jim Fouratt who is written about below.

Rodwell’s partner Fred Sergeant was the model for Dick in the Dick & Jane Reader. (It is a marvelous twist of history that the founding of Gay Liberation came within one degree of separation of Dick, the model for the essential American boy.) Craig Rodwell was one of the founders of the annual parade to memorialize Stonewall. In some ways it was the Christopher Street Liberation Day March the next year commemorating Stonewall that was actually the event that created Gay Pride Marchs.

 

As time has passed, the mythology of Stonewall has come to valorize drag queens as the champions of political and cultural revolution. That's probably missing the point that it was the anti-Establishment tenor of the times, hippie nonchalance and joie de vivre, gay men's sense of being outsiders, and, very importantly, the drugs -- and then, perhaps, the sense of numbers and power observed at Garland's funeral -- that gave the crowd around the Stonewall Inn the impulse to resist the police that night. And inadvertently to initiate the transformation of how gay people see themselves that is the gay rights movement!

 

This was liberation through consciousness change. And that is our queer contribution to the effort of human consciousness to understand how to transform itself and save the future.


Read Toby's personal story of Stonewall--from across the country


Read about URSA and the Hustler Study


Read about The D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance

The 2018 book by Dee Michel Friends of Dorothy: Why Gay Boys and Gay Men Love "The Wizard of Oz" has a chapter on the "Garland funeral Stonewall Riots" theory. He concludes that the connection is more symbolic than factual. The street youth at the Stonewall Inn were a different generation from the homosexual fans of Judy Garland. Though I'd bet all of them had seen The Wizard of Oz, but Dorothy is different from Judy the Diva.

Michel notes that film historian Vito Russo reports having been at both the funeral and at the bar that night. (Of course, Vito!) Russo also dismissed the distressed queens theory, but thought the association symbolic of gay empowerment.




Veteran Gay Activist extraordinaire Jim Fouratt presented a statement about Stonewall and the street demonstrations that followed the original night of resistance to police at a June 23, 2015 meeting of the Landmarks Preservation Committee.

Here's the text:



THE MESSAGE OF STONEWALL
by Jim Fouratt

I am glad to hear that finally there is a discussion of landmarking locations in Greenwich Village that were a part of the beginning of the struggle for equality and equal treatment under the law of all same sex loving people. History was changed that Saturday night in June beginning at 10:30 PM in front of 51-53 Christopher St, when a police officer took a manish looking woman out of the Stonewall Inn and placed her in his police vehicle and went back inside. A small crowd had gathered. She managed to free herself to cheers and in that moment the modern Lesbian and Gay movement was born. [Toby Johnson adds: This butch lesbian has been identified as Stormé DeLarverie, a lesbian who called herself a butch lesbian and drag king.]

We who were actually there that first night and the three that followed know what really happened and why. I was present all four nights.

Stonewall was not a riot. It was a spontaneous rebellion against oppression ignited on Christopher St, in front of a Mafia bar. The Stonewall Inn to me is a symbol of oppression and exploitation by organized crime with the complicity of the New York City Police Department. Every bar in 1969 in the Village that served homosexuals or lesbians operated under this same relationship.

The Stonewall Rebellion ignited the repressed desire for freedom and visibility that is buried deep in every lesbian and gay man. A desire to integrate our erotic desire with physical expression and the integration of our full humanity and personhood in an expression of love.

I welcome the land marking of the building at of 51-53 Christopher St. and the street in front of it. What changed history was not what happened inside the bar but what happened outside on the street. No need to landmark a private business once a gay bar then a bagel shop, now again a bar, and who knows what private business in the future. It 's not the building that historically important, it's the location not the business.

Much of what happened that night has been distorted to read like a 60's political watershed. It was and it was not. It was gay, it was queer and that is a significant difference in how people behaved. Police and hospital records do not support calling it riot. It was a spontaneous rebellion that night and over the next three night which was quietly directed by a small group of gay men who, unlike most of lesbian and gay participants, had been involved in the anti-Vietnam war and draft movement and were experienced at street politics.

Please teach history not as myth but as reality. Landmark the street location where history was made not a bar that served and exploited us.

Jim Fouratt
227 Waverly Place
Greenwich Village NYC Ny MusicAwards

Stonewall Rebellion participant all four nights
Founding member of the first post-Stonewall political group The Gay Liberation Front
CoFounder Wipe Out Aids /Heal 1982
Founding Board Member of the New York City Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center
Founding Member ACT-UP
C-Founder Lesbian and Gay Male Circle 

Here's a link about Jim Fouratt -- http://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwidth.org/tag/activist:+jim+fouratt

Jim Fouratt is second from right in this photo in the striped pants.

About the movie Stonewall (2015)

Michael Bedwell has written a good article about controversies surrounding the 2015 movie directed by Robert Emmerich--though not a review of the movie, since he had not yet seen it.

His description of the crowd accords with what I learned from Toby Marotta (as I assisted him editing his magnum opus and brilliant political analysis of themes in the homosexual rights movement, The Politics of Homosexuality) and with what I have learned from Jim Fouratt. The instigator of the Stonewall Rebellion was a butch lesbian.

Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2015 13:24:02 -0400

Subject: Re: Stonewall, the movie!

While I've yet to see the movie as it's not yet playing close enough to me, I expect I will still feel the same way after having seen it. That is, that the central problem is not the film but the psychopaths who have stampeded so many into hating it for reasons that have NOTHING to do with the actual facts of Stonewall but what they WANT people to believe. Thus, I doubt the objectivity of most reviews, and think they decided to dislike it unseen, and looked for reasons to justify that when they saw it. The "review" in "Vanity Fair" was a clusterfuck of such histrionic, misinformed dishonesty. For now, this is my take:

THE RIOT OF LIES OUTSIDE THE [MOVIE] STONEWALL. When deciding whether to see Roland Emmerich's new film, and how to evaluate it if you do, remember what Walt Whitman wrote: "the historian, if not a liar himself, is largely at the mercy of liars." So, too, filmmakers as the calls for Emmerich's crucifixion along the Hollywood Walk of Shame for creating what some would have us believe is the celluloid equivalent of AIDS keep mounting.

The rioters in 2015 claim that the movie "whitewashes" and "transwashes" what actually happened; that portraying a white (eeew) "cisgender" male from Indiana at the center of the protagonists in 1969 is an insult because all the actual protagonists were people of color and/or trans. But after hundreds of interviews, David Carter, whose 2004 book gay historian Eric Marcus describes as the most "definitive and comprehensive," concluded that, emphasis mine:

"My research for this history demonstrates that if we wish to name the group most responsible for the success of the riots, it is the young, homeless homosexuals, and, contrary to the usual characterizations of those on the rebellion’s front lines, MOST WERE CAUCASIAN; few were Latino; ALMOST NONE WERE TRANSVESTITES OR TRANSSEXUALS; most were effeminate; and A FAIR NUMBER CAME FROM MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILIES. It is remarkable—and no doubt inevitable given human psychology—that in the popular imagination THE NUMBER OF TRANSVESTITES AT THE RIOTS IS ALWAYS EXAGGERATED."

Stonewall veteran and "Philadelphia Gay News" publisher Mark Segal wrote: “If you want to know the facts rather than fiction, read David Carter's book." To be fair, Segal later panned the film after seeing it but primarily for reasons which centered upon his belief that it did not adequately portray GLF which is entirely different from the issues I address here, and from what Carter's book is about. Segal's references to Sylvia Rivera in his review are curious for reasons explained below.

Carter also concludes from his research that, IF there was one person most responsible for triggering the riot, it was either a sometime-hustler white male with a hot temper called Jackie Hormona or a never identified white "stone butch" lesbian who was being abused by the police.

CARTER: >>>There is no doubt that, furious for whatever reason, she put up a fight. [*One witness said], "She was giving them their money's worth," and remembers that there were three or four policemen on her. She fought them all the way from the Stonewall Inn's entrance to the back door of a waiting police car. Once inside the car, she slid back out and battled the police all the way to the Stonewall Inn's entrance.

An unknown woman who recorded the scene in a letter emphasized the lesbian's fury: "Everything went along fairly peacefully until . . . a dyke . . . lost her mind in the streets of the West Village—kicking, cursing, screaming, and fighting." But after she reached the Stonewall the police pulled her back to the police car and again placed her inside it. She got out again and tried to walk away. This time an officer picked her up and heaved her inside. [*He] estimates that the struggle between the police and the lesbian lasted between five and ten minutes. According to yet another account, at around this time a woman—possibly this same lesbian—urged the gay men watching her struggle to help her: "Why don't you guys do something!"

As the heroic fight by the lesbian who had twice escaped the car neared its end, the crowd erupted. The anonymous author of the letter wrote that the woman's fighting "set the whole crowd wild—berserk!" Both the [**"Village Voice"] reporters are agreed that it was the lesbian's struggle with the police that ignited the riot. [**]Truscott wrote: "lt was at that moment that the scene became explosive." [**]Smith's account pinpoints the policeman bodily throwing her inside the car on the third and final attempt to put her in the vehicle as the moment "the turning point came."<<<

As for Hormona, on the cover of Carter's book is the most famous of very few photos taken that night (attached). It appeared in the “New York Daily News” night owl edition, June 29, 1969, page 30, along with an article headlined: "3 Cops Hurt As Bar Raid Riles Crowd." The caption under the picture read: "Crowd attempts to impede police arrests outside the Stonewall Inn, Christopher Street," and the blond "cisgender" boy on the left among others doing that was Hormona. Whether intentional or not, the expression on the face of Emmerich's lead character in a film still is almost identical to Hormona's real life expression in the photo that night.

Emmerich is unequivocally guilty of two things. First, deep throating as so many have Puerto Rican "trans" icon Sylvia Rivera's Big Lie that she was there. Her own best friend, black transvestite Marsha P. Johnson (who everyone agrees was there, and Carter describes, "in the vanguard"), told people that Rivera was actually over 30 blocks away, passed out on heroin in Bryant Park. But Emmerich put a representation of Rivera in the film though the character is allegedly supposed to be a composite of Rivera and another Puerto Rican who was definitely there, Ray Castro. Problem: Castro wasn't trans by any definition, and had short hair. Yet the 2015 rioters have screeched the loudest that Rivera, the "Mother of Stonewall," isn't prominently enough featured in the film—someone who wasn't there AT ALL.

Second, apparently bowing to pressure from the crazies, Emmerich altered the composition of an iconic real life photo, which he said had inspired him, for his variation for the film's poster. The original is of members of New York's Gay Liberation Front, the first new group of any size to grow out of the riot(s). Emmerich’s version shows seven figures, two of them African-American, and possibly one woman, it's hard to tell.

As shown in the attached illustration, in the real photo there’s not a SINGLE black person in the some 20 people, some half of which are apparent lesbians. This is NOT to say that there were no African-Americans and Latinos involved in GLF. However in the context of the film, while I've yet to see it, it appears from this vantage point that if any group is washed out it's LESBIANS. I've learned that that long confrontation between the butch lesbian and the cops is dramatized in the film, although I don't know yet how much or how accurately. That no one appears to be talking about it is just further evidence of how everything but The Party Line is being drowned out.

I'll find that out when I see it, which I intend to even as I expect it not to be particularly good as "cinema." There are "good films" that are terrible history, such as last year's "The Imitation Game"; so terrible in that way, so misrepresentative of what Alan Turing was actually like in his final years—defiantly, proudly gay—that it canceled out the filmmakers' good intentions. I can't make that judgement yet in this case, so for now I still wish to reward Emmerich's good intentions.

And, most of all, I want to spit in the eye of those ruthless lunatics who have stampeded so many into accepting a priori their REWRITE of history, and demanding a pledge of allegiance to the trans flag—at least THEIR version of it for, of course, those transgender are no more of one mind than any other group.

I absolutely support transgender equality. But, sadly, the few with the loudest dishonest voices are controlling the discussion, correction, dogma now. Years ago some even began to insist on calling gay rights pioneer and longtime female impersonator José Sarria "trans" even though HE totally rejected that label. Apparently they control the patent on self-determination. I wouldn't be surprised if the next thing we're told is that Harry Hay and Harvey Milk were actually female-to-male trans people of color.

Michael Bedwell



Stonewall - Jackie Hormona.jpg




Jackie Hormona vs Stonewall film lead.jpg




Stonewall poster vs original image.jpg


Read Toby's personal story of Stonewall--from across the country