My heroes have always been gay historians and drag queens.
This blogger with Hucklefaerie Ken,
Brian Griffin and David Buckham, fellow Church Ladies!
Historian Jonathan Ned Katz
McDarrah PHOTO
It was a rainy Thursday. The sky opening as I made my way to the LGBT Center,
as if the sky is crying we begin “A Drag March Storyslam: Tales of Glamour and
Resistance!” hosted by the Village Preservation - Greenwich Village Society For
Historic Preservation.
Join us for a multimedia storytelling event that
will illuminate, titillate, and educate. A celebration of 25 years, the
creation of a Drag March archive, and a collection of memorable storytelling
performances!
This event is fully accessible”
Like Stonewall itself, everyone has their own drag march narrative.
This event is fully accessible”
Like Stonewall itself, everyone has their own drag march narrative.
Hucklefaery
Ken and Brian Griffin invited
me.
“This
year is the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riot, and the 25th Anniversary of
Drag March, which was founded in response to Stonewall 25’s rejection of Drag,
gender-nonconforming, fetish, and others marginalized within the queer
community. Drag March is the only grassroots, leaderless Pride event that
marches without a permit. It’s the only Pride march that travels from the East
Village to the West Village. Its storied history is one of glamour and
resistance, of movements and activists that define the Village, the legacies of
the misfit beginnings of the Village’s queer movements, and so, so much more.
The narratives
growing from this space are many.
Anarchists
and queers connecting and clashing through time.
The stores
are many.
My
friend, the historian
Jonathan Ned Katz, met for coffee earlier in the week. We
met at a Rise and Resist Action, zapping the president.
His writings have inspired generations of
queer historians, journalists, and writers.
We’d been chatting about history and lost friends, anarchism and
fighting at the the Bus stop
in the West Village. He told me a few stories
about his life in the city, father, a radical. I ask about Keller’s, the iconic leather bar on Barrow
and West
12th Street. He only went once. And we chat about friendships,
including the poet Ed Fields. And the conversation
turns to Allen Bérubé, the gay
historian, who shuffled off years before his time. But working with Allen was one of the high points of his life. The friendship are what this is all about during
those years. Friendship and Freedom
was the name of the first gay rights periodical. Its founder Henry Gerber formed
the Society for Human Rights in 1924, and later lost his job with the postal service.
When he was arrested, all his journals were confiscated, copies of his notes,
and issues of Friendship and Freedom.
Although only two copies of the publication were produced, they found
their way into the hands of Magnus Hirschfeld,
the noted German physician and
sexologist, who placed
it in an archive with other early homosexual publications.
Courts eventually call for the
return of Gerber’s notebook and files.
Yet, only his typewriter was turned.
All his journals were lost to history.
“Perhaps they are somewhere, lost
in a police archive,” I wonder.
Eventually the topic turns to friendship
and its inevitable pair/ dialectical
twin, fighting.
“I tried to stay away from the
fights in GAA. We put on a play at the
firehouse. I did the play - Coming Out!
- separately from GAA. (There is great stuff
on OutHistory.org about the play)
I was proud of it. I was proud that I confronted the director over
his drinking. The production was better
as result. It worked for gay liberation in New York. It was a highlight of my life… a cooperative
experience. In the face of the horror in the work – being in GAA
was fighting a great evil like World War
II or ACT UP…But the solidarity make it so wonderful. Much of that cooperation feels like it is missing
under capitalism.”
Its long queer history that becomes
Jonathan’s life work, a history that enveloped him.
Katz recalls the days before
liberation. It was 1961, he picks up a man, who tries to blackmail him:
Sixteen
years later, the world had changed. Men
were supporting each other.
“… in 1977, in a consciousness-raising group, I compare
notes about dangerous encounters with a group of gay men. It turns out four
other guys have suffered a similar or worse threat. We commiserate about our
gay lives before gay liberation. We begin to speak out; we begin to resist.”
Resisting meant Coming Out!
Those were days when activists were
literally fighting for their lives.
Vito
was a force of those early meetings.
“We Love You Vito!” members of ACT UP cheered on Gay Pride
Day 1990 under the balcony of Larry Kramer’s apartment where the iconic queer
activist sat that day, five months before he succumbed to the virus.
They were such losses, the AIDS years, and would have so
much to say if they had lived.
As Sarah Schulman points out, it
was the creative experimental ones, the Vitos, were the first to go.
Gradually, the conversation turns to anarchist Eve Adams, the current
subject of Katz’s research.
He is researching a carefully
documented biography of the Polish, Jewish, lesbian immigrant to the U.S. in
1912 who called herself “Eve Adams.”
After immigrating as “Chawe
Zlocsewer,” she finally settled on “Eve Adams.” She suggested, perhaps, that
her androgynous person combined a bit of Eve and a bit of Adam.
Eve is of interest for publishing,
in 1925, a daring, unique, pioneering book titled Lesbian Love, a community study of women she had known, that also
reveals much about her.
Eve Adams is also notable for opening
queer and bohemian-friendly “tea rooms” in Chicago and New York, in the 1920s.
Eve’s hangout, at 129 MacDougal
Street, in Greenwich Village, was a popular spot until her arrest in 1926 for
publishing an “obscene” book and for “disorderly conduct” (alleged attempted sex
with a policewoman sent to entrap her). Eve was tried, found guilty, jailed,
and then deported in 1927.
Residing in German- and
Italian-occupied France in 1943, Eve was arrested and sent to Auschwitz,
becoming a victim of the Holocaust. Katz is focusing on Eve’s resistant life in
his biography: Eve Adams Living.
The University of Wisconsin Press
will publish the biography. No publication date is yet set. Katz hopes that
OutHistory.org, the major LGBT history website, will publish the original documents
that reveal this pioneer’s life.
If anyone knows of documents about
Eve Adams that Katz might not have discovered, he asks to be contacted at jnk123@mac.com
Full credit will be given for any
assistance.
Friends with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman,
the renowned anarchists, Eve was viewed as a dangerous radical.
Listening I am thinking of our
friend Leslie, who we met in Krakow, who survived the death camp.
And Milena Jesenská, Kafka’s love, who perished in Ravensbrück in Germany.
Several accounts
of her days there have found their way into publication.
She maintained a correspondence with Kafka from1920-23.
Kafka wrote:
“Writing
letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts, and by no means just the ghost
of the addressee but also with one's own ghost, which secretly evolves inside
the letter one is writing.:
We talk about the witch
trials and panics of our history.
By Thursday, it was pouring as I rode
out to see Jonathan and take part in the
drag storytelling night at the Center.
Its been a quarter century of stories about the drag
march, my favorite night of pride weekend, without sponsors, we’ve kept it together,
through a countless approaches to reclaiming public space.
But even here the controversies are
many.
Permit or no permit.
No permit.
Only one person has been arrested,
A black man in 2012.
Clothes soaked, I list to story after
story, perspective after perspective.
“It was my first coming out in drag,” one man declares. “Wear
whatever you wanted to wear. This is our
time.”
t was a space for speak out
and be who we are.
“I’m gonna tell a little story,” notes another.
“I was asked to dress like Judy Garland in
2004. I did a performance, took a shot of vodka, overdosed and
died. They lift me up and carried me
across the village. Gay men were wailing all the way to the Stonewall,
where I’m resurrected…”
Ken is introducing everyone. I can’t
get all their names, but I jot down a
couple.
“It gives me great pleasure to
introduce another legendary performer,
Please welcome John Kelly.”
John steps up on stage.
“I was born in Jersey. And the only thing good about Jersey City is
the path train to the village. I had an elder who took me to see the Cockettes
their second night here…. And that was the beginning. When Ruby Rimms gave me a tip at the Anvil in
1993 I knew I had arrived. I decided my
activism was going to be about this” recalled John. He shared about a lover lost to AIDS. “I take these moments and performances and
dedicate them to our friends who’ve come and
gone. These gestures are really
how we’ve sustained ourselves in the face
of AIDS.”
Amica recalled, “Someone brought a
paper bag of sequins. For five years
they were everywhere.”
Another man recalled his first march
in 1970 the year after Stonewall. Bette
was there. And then it started being
about money and I stopped going until I discovered the drag march.”
“When gay marriage was announced at
the Stonewall, we felt like we had arrived,” another man recalled.
But this didn’t stop others from
chanting:
“We don’t want to marry. We just
wanna fuck!”
Following that, I read about that
night in 2011 when all New York City
felt like Marti Gras.
I read an excerpt from my book Rebel Friendships:
“This eighteenth Drag March was both a street party
and a critical mass, opening public space for everyone as our cavalcade
cascaded through the streets and made history at the Stonewall once again. “The
Drag March started as a protest against the organizers of the Gay Pride Parade
(officially the LGBT Pride Parade),” notes Guncle (2011), offering a little
history. “During the 25th Anniversary of the Stonewall riots, this very white
male- influenced and weirdly conservative group thought that drag and leather
were no longer appropriate for the annual parade. [T]hey ignored the fact that
it was trannies and drag queens who were the majority of rioters at Stonewall.”
From here, people started planning, and the Drag March was born (Gallagher,
1994). Every year since 1994, queers in New York City have kicked off Pride
weekend with this unpermitted neighborhood street procession. I first attended
in 1999, when the rumblings of the nascent alter- globalization movement
overlapped with some 12 years of queer ACTing Up in the city. The global
justice movement would make its national debut during trade talks in Seattle
later that fall, the burlesque of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT
UP)’s rambunctious queer political tradition finding its way into much of the
playful “tactical frivolity” of the ascendant movement (Shepard, 2009). The
plan for the 2011 march was no different from the plans of other years. “Drag
is what one makes it. Dress for success? Dress down? Undress? Under duress?
Anyone can join in,” a flyer declared. “All it takes is a well spent dollar at
your favorite second hand clothing store and a dream. Brought to us by the New
York Radical Faeries and The Church Ladies for Choice.” Time’s Up!, a cycling
group I worked with, promoted the event on its website: “Come ready to dance.
Remember nothing says resistance like drag queens in high heels. Tonight we’ll
have hundreds of them, plus a sound bike!” The group planned to bring a sound
bike and iPod to ignite a dance party immediately following the march,
contributing in its own way to the festive celebration of colors, streets, and
New York City’s unique culture of resistance. As usual, the plan was to meet at
Tompkins Square Park (Eighth Street entrance) at 7 p.m. and revel in the East
Village summer sun before marching west to Stonewall Place/Christopher Street.
That Friday night, I rode out from my house in Carroll Gardens, in South
Brooklyn, up to Williamsburg to meet some others from Time’s Up! to gather up
the sound system. In our interview years earlier, Eric Rofes had suggested that
one can make friendships anywhere, but his most important friendships were from
movements. When I showed up at the Time’s Up!
space in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, just
below the Williamsburg bridge, I was struck by the scene. I did not know Keegan
Stephan well. But he walked down to let me in. Opening the door, he had a beer
in his hand and was wearing a gold one- piece bathing suit he had cut in half
with his long hair down. Looking at me, he scratched and tucked; he looked like
a tough guy with his beard and long hair, ready to ride— very gender- fuck.
Another volunteer with the group, Joe, was there to help set up the sound bike,
a bike equipped with the equivalent of a car stereo on its back. He wore pink
hose, a wig, and a T- shirt that declared, “Trans Power.” “I think I was
working on bikes again when you and Joe showed up,” recalled Stephan. “What is
great about that space is to be able to work in that space and have people like
you and Joe show up and start talking with me about things. Joe came to hook up
the sound bike, and he was in drag and looked great. And you showed up. And
both of your energy was so inspiring that I . . . was brought into that
movement that night because of my friendship with you guys.” “Come Sail Away”
and “I Want to Be Free” blared out of the sound bike speakers as we rode
through the fog across the Williamsburg Bridge into the city. Onlookers
screamed with approval as they heard the sound bike. “It was joyous,” continued
Stephan. “And then we rolled into the march, and everyone was thrilled to see
us. And sort of the broader community was plugged in; people I had worked with
in the Reverend Billy campaign, people that I know from Rainforest Relief, and
other direct action groups were all there.” Harmonie Moore, also known as Brian
Griffin, greeted us and offered us an iPod full of drag anthems for the dance
party. I loved my first glance of the Faeries, drag queens, and village
vagabonds in their colors, costumes, and glitter at the park; they were a mix
that felt like a reunion of the Cockettes and the cast from Hedwig and the
Angry Inch. Anarchists mugged with drag queens, trannies with hipsters, hippies
with crusty punks, and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and homeless people
cavorted together, playing drums, dancing, blowing bubbles, and sharing space
in the nether zone of the East Village. At around 7:45, the Faeries called for
those in attendance to circle. Everyone gathered and held hands as various
Radical Faeries welcomed the Witches of the East, West, South, and North, with
Faeries strolling through the circle to remind everyone why we were there.
Harmonie Moore passed out lyric sheets for “Under the Rainbow” for after the
parade, with information on the back about New Alternatives, a social services
program for homeless queer youth. Street youth were the ones who ignited the
riot after all. And the bikers, Church Ladies, and Faeries meandered out of the
park, west on St. Mark’s Place.
“We were all
bonded and one,” explained Stephan. “And as we marched, other people that I
knew in my life were marching with other people that I knew who joined in.”
People always cheer for the march. As they leaned out of their windows, a
friend of mine said he felt more like he was at Mardi Gras than at the march.
It certainly felt that way, particularly when the ride intersected with
“Queerball,” a radical street party organized by members of the Rude Mechanical
Orchestra (RMO), who joined the drummers in the march, playing “When the Saints
Go Marching In.” More and more different groups converged, with the Time’s Up!
Central Park Traffic Calming Ride intersecting with Critical Mass at Broadway—
all headed West. At one point, a Japanese dance troupe joined the parade,
dancing along with us. Harmonie Moore led everyone in a rendition of the Mary
Tyler Moore theme song: “Love is all around, no need to waste it. You can have
a town, why don’t you take it.” The sun was setting in the summer sky. Few knew
all the lyrics, yet most everyone joined in for the chorus, “You’re gonna make
it after . . . You’re gonna make it after all!” throwing their hands in the
air. The Church Ladies for Choice sang “God Is a Lesbian” to the tune of “God Save
the Queen.” Others chanted, “Arrest us. Just try it. Remember, Stonewall was a
riot!” Some screamed, “We don’t want to marry; we just want to fuck!” When we
arrived at the Stonewall, everyone sang the familiar words:
Somewhere over the rainbow Way up high, There’s a
land that I heard of Once in a lullaby.
Hokey, but many are still moved to connect with this
piece of history (Ariel, 2011). There remains a utopian hope in the lyrics and
their dream that there could be a different world out there. The riot being
commemorated, after all, took place on the night of Judy Garland’s funeral
(Weinstein, 2009). As everyone sang, for a little while, we were all friends,
connected for a moment in time. Hanging out in the street at the Stonewall, the
Radical Faeries and RMO played drums while the dancing crowd swelled. After the
sun had gone down, some meandered into the bar for cocktails. I ran into one of
the “Yes Men” covered in sparkles. We talked about how hot the march had been.
“So much has been good this year,” he said nodding and looking around. After a
couple of songs, Joe turned on the sound bike to play “Fly Robin Fly.” A few
Faeries started a makeshift ballet performance in the streets. The crowd
expanded when “Dancing Queen” came on. As the street party
started growing, the police moved in, first to get
Joe to turn down the music and then to push the crowd out of the streets. The
year before, we had scheduled the dance party for 10 p.m., after a brief bike
ride, allowing the crowds to leave only to pump up the sound system on our
return. The crowd reconverged. Joe and company danced on cars. At the 2011
march, there was no such pause in the action. Instead, Drag March participants
collaborated to hold the space. Run- ins with police are not uncommon at the
Drag March. In 2008, the unpermitted action was also just about shut down
before it could begin (Shepard, 2010). In 2011, the police were in no mood to
be killed with kindness. After the group sang “Somewhere over the Rainbow” at
the Stonewall, they pushed forward. The crowd started to chant, “Whose streets?
Our streets!” Joe pushed the sound system further into the crowd, and the
police tried to arrest Yotom, an activist from Time’s Up! His friends separated
them, getting in the way of the police crackdown as he stood on a police car.
With a little help from the crowd, Yotom proceeded to literally unarrest
himself, pulling away from the police and exiting the scene, only to return in
a different outfit. Unable to detain him, the police attempted to confiscate
his bicycle. “That is not your property,” said Bill, another organizer with
Times Up!, to the police, who ignored him. He insisted, “That is not your bike.
You cannot take it.” As he spoke, another bike supporter inserted the pedal of
his bike into the wheel of Yotom’s bike and pulled backward. The scene became
more and more chaotic as the push and pull between the police and activists
escalated. Activists were eventually able to grab control of the bike.
Meanwhile, a gentleman in a white wedding dress started talking with the
police. Once again, the police were going on about us not having a permit. A
few of us noted that the First Amendment is a permit for those wanting to
“peaceably assemble” and enjoy a little of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.” “You can’t do this tonight,” the man in the wedding dress implored
as negotiations intensified. Another observer would note, “We did this last
year without a permit. We let the cars through and kept on dancing.” The man in
the wedding dress chimed in: “They are voting on gay marriage in Albany right
now. And this is the anniversary of Stonewall. You don’t want a riot do you?”
“The pushback was all very spontaneous,” noted Jessica Rechtschaffer of the
Radical Homosexual Agenda, who also took part. “There was very little traffic,
a great vibe in the air. Traffic could pass. And the cops started pushing.
People realized this was stupid and unnecessary.” “We were on Christopher
Street dancing in front of the Stonewall Inn when the law was passed legalizing
gay marriage,” Stephan recalled. “We went nuts. The police came up and tried to
get us to shut it down. Do
you want a riot on your hands? This is the Drag
March, and gay marriage was just passed. Let us revel. It was a crazy and
glorious night. And all the stories of my friendships from that night— there
was me, you, and Joe. Tim Doody was there. Our good friend Yotom had an epic,
epic night that night. He came out in drag, and then he jumped on a cop car.
That was a huge night for him,” Stephan gushed, full of wonder at what the
evening became. By this point, the sound bike was booming. The policeman
eventually left and went back to community affairs. “We were able to take the
street while the police fell back,” Rechtschaffer continued. “It was a glorious
night.” It was getting closer to 10 p.m., and Christopher Street was a full-
blown street party. “Express Yourself,” “YMCA,” and “Macho Man” all boomed from
the sound system. After 10 p.m., rumblings came from the bar that gay marriage
had passed in Albany, and the crowd broke out in applause and cheers. People
wanted a New York song, so Joe put on “New York State of Mind” by Jay Z, and
all of Christopher Street sang along. Beyoncé’s “All the Single Ladies” drew
roars from people in the crowd, who reveled in her reference to marriage in the
campy song: “If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it.” “I was
honored to be there DJing on such a historic occasion,” Joe noted. “I feel like
that night was historic,” recalled Stephan. “That was also a huge night for me
in becoming a fuller activist and a fuller human being. And part of that was
that first moment when I was being a bike mechanic, which was the role I had in
the group, and then you guys, your positive energies and friendship, drawing me
out and letting me access this other part of myself as an activist and human
being, which is a big part of myself. I love it. I revel in it.”
Finishing my talk, my friend Todd Tif Fernandez,
whose just walked in, declares, “I was that man in the white wedding dress.” I know Todd from environmental activism. That’s the beauty of the drag march, the
overlapping movements which converge here, between Critical Mass and Extinction
Rebellion, the cyclists and marching bands, anarchists and anti-assimilationists
colliding and sharing space within this permit
less parade.
Come on up and
tell your story, everyone declares,
One story after another.
“Get our of the street or you will be arrested,”
Huckelfaerie screams into the mic imitating the police. Oral history accounts of the parade blur with
diverging and conflicting memories. Huck traces his drag march story, “exploring the intersection between performance, theater and activism.”
“We can all agree that words do matter,” he begins.
“Having people call a
circle, casting a circle you are between
worlds. For me my experience began with
the circle. We had these rituals we would do, the Radical Faeries led me to the
drag march. In 2003, after we cast the circle, we welcome
everyone. The Patriot Act has been
passed and people are scared. We welcome everyone into the circle,
the punks, the crusties, the
homeless, the people who do
not always get the love they deserve from
the world. We were tripping
balls. We don’t have a plan to take the street. But we find ourselves on Ave A.
The Critical Mass comes. We’re
getting pushed into the bikes. I have been arrested before, at Matthew Shepard 1998. (I was arrested there as well). And the cops lead us to the Stonewall. In 2008, the cops scream get out of the
street or you are going to jail. Seeing my old ACT UP friends and the tank man in Beijing from 1989, I think I said you
need to fix this to the cops.”
“Arrest us just try it! Stonewall was a riot!!!” activists
start screaming, filling the street, as we always do, regardless of the police,
who seem fixated on control.
And the march moves Westward.
No permit.
Each year the police want us to get a permit and we resist.
Afterall, there is no need to ask for a permit for a right we already have.
This year, Huck was corned into it by the police, who
pointing out that many groups are vying
for the space outside the Stonewall.
Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness takes
countless forms.
It’s a hard call.
All he knows if Friday, June 28th, we will
sing and have a dance party.
History is a blurry space, with countless overlapping
stories.
Jonathan and I chat with the drag heroes.
In the Invention of Heterosexuality, Katz describes a political economy of pleasure. Hopefully we can all support such a space,
the drag march is an embodiment of that.
We make our way back out into the rainy night.
History is rumbling.
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