Bruce Benderson on Stonewall at Fifty

Bruce Benderson on Stonewall at Fifty

Interview by Dale Corvino

DC: 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, which I understand was a long weekend of fighting back against police brutality, led by bar patrons, gay street kids, drag queens, transgender folks, and hustlers. The way it’s been commemorated has morphed over the years. Last year, I was at a meeting where a young organizer from Heritage of Pride (HoP) presented proposed changes to the parade route. I asked him if the NYPD had been involved, and he confirmed that they had dictated the proposed changes, and HoP just accepted this, in the name of safety, security, and minimizing disruption. This anecdote brings to mind your observation about the gentrification of the gay rights movement. So, fifty years later, how should we reflect on Stonewall?

BB: Well, one thing you didn’t mention is revisionism. I feel that the identity of Stonewall has been revised. Stonewall was a mafia-run bar, it’s true. Though drag queens were not always well treated, it was incredible, the most popular bar in the West Village, packed every weekend. It had dancing. You could dance any way you wanted; sometimes people slow danced. When the lights blinked on and off it meant the cops were coming, and you just separated for about 30 seconds, and then went back to what you were doing. I know it’s perverse to say, but the mafiarun bars in New York were some of the most enjoyable, lively, sensual, sexy, festive places, my favorite bars. I didn’t know at the time they were mafia run, but that’s why they were so much fun, because a lot of the rules were suspended, such as male-on-male dancing. There was a certain amount of gay freedom at the Stonewall. Other bars didn’t allow dancing, certainly not close dancing.

I always had the most wonderful time there, and never once did I feel like the sort of homosexual who had to shrink off into a corner, or that I’d get arrested. The cops were probably paid off, because the lightblinking episode would last less than one minute. I’m sure the transvestites had it much worse than I did. To be perfectly honest, I don’t remember seeing them, although they must have been there. When the rebellion started, there was a law on the books against cross-dressing. I don’t think that the rebellion started because we were repressed gays being exploited by the Stonewall owners. It started because the cross-dressers were being harassed by the police. And now that whole

thing has been revised; there have been movies about it in which Stonewall is this dreary, intimidating place and you’re hiding in the shadows and you could get arrested at any moment. That’s not how it was.

The revisionist tendency is that Stonewall’s history involved gays who had been repressed, punished, and exploited by that bar. It was the opposite. Stonewall was a banquet of sensuality and opportunity. The mafia was probably making a lot of money, but it was not a negative experience for the customers, and it’s been revised as practically like a prison, a punishing place where you were in danger of ending up in jail or being beaten up by the cops. The pleasure that we had

Bruce Benderson, Photo by Bertrand Le Pluard ©2019

there doesn’t exist in the history books, but it doesn’t exist anywhere today, that pleasure that comes from a mixing of the tribes. The reason that no clubs are enjoyable today is because there’s much less mixing of class and race.

As an example, take Studio 54, which was exciting not only for its celebrities, but because it was a class democracy. Inside you could see a black bicycle messenger dancing with someone like Liza Minnelli. Every class and race and sexual orientation and gender were welcome, if they looked interesting, and looking interesting could involve something very eccentric. Once you got in, you were free to relate to everybody from every economic level, every race, and that’s what created the party at Studio 54.

The moment Reagan was elected and Times Square got gentrified by Mayor Giuliani, the races and the classes were torn asunder, poor people were pushed to the peripheries, and real estate was bought up and

renovated. This ended that festive atmosphere of which the Stonewall, Studio 54, and even Julius’s were incredible examples.

DC: You have argued that marriage and the military—the two high-profile issues of the gay movement of recent times—are essentially conservative institutions that we should want nothing to do with. You make the case that marriage exists as a conflation of church and state.

BB: Yes, right. And I thought that the constitution guaranteed the separation of church and state. People

want to be bound together into couples, to raise children, to insure inheritance, all the other things you get out of marriage; but all of that could have been realized by domestic partnership, which has absolutely nothing to do with religion.

In the 60s, during the early days of the gay liberation movement, communes formed in which there was no central family authority—twenty people living together who all had the same agency—who raised children as a collaboration. It was more like an Israeli kibbutz, a communist idea. When gays are allowed into these mainstream institutions like the military and marriage, there’ll always be that segment of gays—like me—who can’t relate, who were already alienated from the construct of “community” before, and who are now doubly so. We won’t even have our gay brothers and sisters any more, we’ll be weirdos, the new spinsters, old maids, in fact..

I know it’s a big dream to end marriage in the United States and allow—in legal terms—only domestic partnerships, and let people add whatever religious ritual they wish. It seems like an impossible change. Well, guess what else seemed impossible? Gay marriage. Gays openly serving in the military. Why didn’t they

work for these other goals that would have improved society so much more and been more in tune with social changes? Marriage is not working. You want to get married? Marriage is falling apart. Marriage as an institution hasn’t worked for a millennium. Marriage has been defined and redefined, as I discussed in my book. Marriage as the result of romantic pairing is historically recent. My grandparents, from Russia, were in an arranged marriage. And guess what? There were almost no divorces at that time. I’m not saying it was an open or free system, but marriage for love is a volatile formula. Why should gay activists promote it?

DC: Now that we’re at this place where we have gay people getting married, being married, is there the potential to redefine marriage in some ways? Even hope that our participation might cleave the state institution from the religious?

BB: I think the state will cleave us. What I think will happen is those liberal heterosexuals who welcomed us into the community of family will discover—especially when it comes to two men—that we do not follow the same rules they do, and when they discover it, they will be astonished and possibly so disgusted that—well, maybe it’s an exaggeration to say it could lead to a new Holocaust—but it might lead to even more rejection of gays by the general social body. When they find out a man with children goes to peepshows to suck the penises of strangers? There will be a backlash when they find out about those things because obviously no one’s talking about peepshows, or promiscuity in general, when they talk about marriage. How will they react to the discovery of those married gay men who still go to peep shows, have three-ways, have open relationships?

DC: As for your case against the focus on military service, is it coming out of pacifism?

BB: Yes. Don’t join the military, dismantle the military, or change the military. Instead of fighting to be a member of the military, fight to end unjust wars, right? Like they did in the Vietnam era.

The 60’s gay liberation movement didn’t want to join the military, they wanted to stop the war. Do these new militant gays even believe in the wars we’re involved in? And why does that issue never seem to come up?

DC: I tend to agree, but then I think of poor and working-class gay people who see the military as the best of very few options for employment and/or

access to education.

BB: That’s a very good point, and the same could be said for service on a police force. As for openly serving in either, I have nothing against that. What I’m against is making those two things—marriage and military service—the major political goals of the gay movement. Working-class gays in the military, police, or fire departments should have freedom to express themselves, and laws protecting them. But the more important goals are those we started on in the 60’s, which have been cast aside.

What really disgusts me is that we are begging those who hated us to accept us. These are the people who put men like us in mental institutions, who arrested us and put us in jail, sometimes falsely, for corruption of a minor. Is that really the major goal of the gay movement? How about being for better education for working-class people so that they have more choices? I find the new social goals for gays very cynical goals, because they’re all about inclusion. We want inclusion from people who rejected us, from people who tortured us. So that we can be just like them? Well, they were horrible.

It reminds me what happened to the feminist movement. When feminism first started, I thought it was great; they were challenging masculinity. But guess what many of those feminists wanted? They wanted male privilege. They wanted the most oppressive male traits. They wanted to be CEO’s, to be lawyers, heads of banks. The goal should have been to dismantle the male paradigm around those occupations and change them, not just let a woman join the company and be just as big an asshole. Hasn’t it always been change we’re after? Not merely inclusion.

DC: Maybe what our movement (and other movements) need is working from within and from without to effect change? I wonder if open service for gay and trans people can have an impact on the mission and

purpose of the US military? I more or less doubt it.

BB: I’ll be even more nihilistic: I do not believe there’s a homosexual identity. Back when homosexuality was oppressed, we developed a very rich defensive culture that was full of parody, irony, bitterness, mockery. That was homosexual culture, a culture of oppression. Once these oppressions got lifted you began to realize–and you can see this in the current vapidity of gay magazines, that perhaps there is not a profound gay identity.

DC: Circling back to Stonewall, with respect to your challenge to the notion of gay identity. We’ve commemorated this incident of fighting police suppression one hot weekend fifty years ago as central to gay identity. We’re at a point where there’s HoP, which is criticized for being heavily corporate, for letting the very body that oppressed us dictate the parade route. Now a second organization, Reclaim Pride, is countering those tendencies. Where do you think that leads towards understanding gay identity such as it is, and the movement?

BB: A second group that opposes this whole event? Well, you have to tell me more about them. Sounds good to me.

DC: On one hand, you have the official group running a corporate-sponsored parade, providing the NYPD with buy-in and hours of overtime pay. It’s a tradition, now overrun by police concerns of safety and security. On the other, you have a group that’s looking to honor the notion of resistance, willing to raise difficult truths, in particular the sore point that the NYPD has never apologized for its violent oppression of gay people. We ourselves are at this cleaved state about how to commemorate Stonewall.

BB: Well, I don’t know how much change this splinter group will be able to effect or how much power they’ll have, but I certainly like the idea. This isn’t the first time that splinter groups have tried to influence gay commemorations and gay history. In ‘86, NAM- BLA members wanted to march in the LA Gay Pride Parade, and Harry Hay supported them. We can’t decide who we want and who we don’t want, whether we approve or not, because they’re part of homosexual culture and the movement, and Hay spoke up in defense of them. So of course, they weren’t allowed to march. There have been splinter groups opposing the mainstream before.