“The Queens are Bashing the Cops:” Forty Years Later ©. 

I wrote the following piece in 2009 on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising in New York City which occurred on this day in 1969. 

by Dan Mouer

It was mid-1969 and I was making a living selling my writing and photography to the “underground” and alternative press in New York City. I was working on a story about Norman Mailer’s bid to win the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York. For me that was an easy gig, because it basically meant hanging out at one of my favorite West Village watering holes, The Lion’s Head.

My full-time job was Managing Editor of an innovative tabloid called The New York Review of Sex and Politics. Sam Edwards was the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief. Sam had created the NYRS&P out of the demise of his former rag, The New York Free Press. The “Freep” had pissed off the City’s Finest—understandably. On the back cover of each weekly issue, Sam and the gang had featured a virtualrogues’ gallery of photographs of New York’s undercover narcotics agents. It was 1969, after all, and the pursuers of youthful alternative lifestyles often perceived the great struggle between good and evil to be most manifest in the struggle of “heads” versus “pigs.” For the “heads,” busting the narcs was a

blow for freedom. I’m quite certain that the “pigs” saw the Free Press as endangering the lives of officers.

It happened this way: quite suddenly the Free Press had begun to disappear from newstands throughout the city. The following week our distributors were told that most of the newstands would not accept the paper at all. A few confessed that they had been bullied into that decision by police officers who threatened to find ways to take away individual stand owners’ business licenses.

These guys were not willing to lose their livelihoods for the potheads’ cultural revolution! Without distribution outlets, the

Free Press” died and, two or three weeks later a new underground rag with a flashy and classy look and feel appeared in its place on the city’s newstands. It was the New York Review of Sex & Politics

I came to the NYRS&P in the moment of its birth. My wife had been working as the “Freep’s” secretary, and when Sam said he wanted some new talent working on the new paper, she suggested I go talk to him.

I was hired on the spot with the provision that we all worked under at the time: actually getting paid would depend entirely on how many papers we could sell. Well, as it happens, having “Sex” in the

title of the new rag helped to sell a lot of papers, so not only did we get paid our salaries, but the paper could afford much classier prduction values than had been previously seen in the underground press. Good paper, lots of color, and top-notch talent became the hallmarks of NYRS&P.

I had gotten a lot of essays and articles into print during the previous year, not only in the underground press, but also in several national magazines; although these were generally second-string men’s magazines like Rogue and Cavalier. In fact, Rogue Magazinehad referred to me as “one of the most sought-after writers in the underground.” Well, that was a bit fanciful, but I had become “established” in the anti-establishment. I had been a photographer since childhood, and I had served as my high

school newspaper’s official “man with a camera.” In New York I was often seen running around with one of my fast-working little Leica M3s or, conversely, a big old Mamiyaflex.

As an aspiring 23-year-old writer with a mind to elevate my career above the limited fortunes of the underground, I had begun hanging out with other, more established writers. One of my favorite spots was The Lion’s Head on Christopher Street in the Village. The bar was near the offices of The Village Voice, New York’s old-line liberal weekly. As such, The Lion’s Head was haunted by some of the top leftist writers in the city. One could always hope to find a way to strike up a conversation with Nat

Hentoff, Pete Hamill, Norman Mailer or other writers who watered there frequently.

Always looking for, or cooking up, a story, I had used my visits to the Lion’s Head not just as opportunities to enhance

my jounalistic karma, but to capture images of some of “the greats” with spilled scotch on their starched collars. After all, for those of us in the underground press, the Voice had come to represent backward and uptight points of view. Among other things, this paper, the first of New York’s “alternative” weeklies, was hardly friendly to New York’s gay community. This was ironic as Christopher Street was clearly the Main Street of the city’s queer world at the time.

On this night I was drinking scotch at a table waiting to see my friend and NYRS&P colleague, Ray Schultz. While I thought of myself as a “writer,” Ray had inherited the “journalist” gene. He was a sharp investigator and interviewer, and he was our ace political reporter. Sam had assigned Ray the job of the year, to follow the rapidly unfolding story of the mayoral candidacy of

Norman Mailer and that of his running made for City Council President, Jimmy Breslin. We had long ago given Ray the nickname “The Jimmy Breslin of the Underground,” a title he clearly identified with. I was also hoping–even expecting—to see both Mailer and Breslin at the bar that night.

As it happened I don’t think Ray or the quarry of our aspiring journalistic dynamic duo showed up. I do know that I hung out way too late and had at least one too many glasses of scotch. I had shot up all but a couple frames of my 12-shot roll of film making what would surely be blurry and grainy dimly lighted images for my growing story on The Lion’s Head and its literary tipplers. Just as I was about to call it a night and head home to my apartment in downtown Brooklyn someone came into the bar and shouted out “The queens are bashing the cops!”

Up the street near Sheridan Square stood the Stonewall Inn, one of the Village’s gay bars…except, technically, there was no such thing as a “gay bar.” Homosexuality was illegal and public display of sexual or gender variance was grounds for arrest. It was completely “normal” for police to roust customers in gay bars and to harrass the bar owners with threats of losing their licenses or being fined with sanitation violations and the like. I knew where the Stonewall was so I headed in that direction with my camera. It wasn’t hard to find the place because it was quickly turning into a street circus scene full of flashing police car lights and angry, taunting customers defying orders to disperse.

I couldn’t really figure out what was going on, but apparently, I was told, the Stonewall’s customers got angry at some routine police harrassment and decided spontaneously to strike back. They had

barricaded some of the officers inside the bar and were now throwing beer cans and taunts at newly arriving police cars. There were drag “girls” doing a chorus line dance right in front of a police car with officers inside with windows tightly shut. I quickly shot my last couple frames of film and moved on towards the subway station to head home. It was simply ironic. Now the harrassers were the harrassees.

It was a moment of poetic justice. An interesting asterisk to place alongside the perennial history of gay persecution. Or that’s how it seemed to me. I really didn’t expect it to be seen as a very big deal. But I was wrong. The press was full of stories about the “riot” at the Stonewall, and that, in turn, ignited the spark of rebellion in many of New York’s gay and lesbian community. For the next two nights gays and their supporters converged on Sheridan Square to demonstrate for gay rights. POf course, the NYRS&P had to carry the story! Now, between Norman Mailer’s run for the Mayor’s

office and the Stonewall demonstrations we had all we needed to fill our pages with newsworthy sex and politics! And the politics of sex!

The weekend-long Stonewall riot clearly led to an escalation of

the gay liberation movement in New York. Over the next year I would cover the city’s first “Gay Power” parade, and I would find myself working with pioneering gay activist Jack Nichols and his

partner Lige Clarke in our mutual offices at Milky Way Productions, publishers of Screw, The Sex Review and Gay Magazine. The emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement was the beginning of a new awareness for me personally. It was everyday interaction with gay activists as fellow counter-culture denizens that led to

my growing acceptance of my own bisexuality.

Forty years later, we had a president who promised to work for full rights for LGBT people and I found myself happily married to a transman. It wasn’t all because of Stonewall, of course, but it certainly makes what was simply an interesting footnote in my personal history worthy of landmark status in the history of civil rights.