The Stonewall riots: what have we learnt 40 years on?
Forty years ago a police raid on a New York bar ignited the gay rights movement. But with hard-won equality, has the spirit of Stonewall been lost?
Wake up and smell the moisturiser. That would be my advice to any gay Rip Van Winkle who had slept the 40 years since those astonishing riots that erupted after a small-hours police raid on June 28, 1969, on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.
Gay venues such as this in the US (and Britain) were subject to continual police harassment, but what made that warm June night in a free-thinking New York neighbourhood different was a sudden, spontaneous, collective resolve — for once — not to run away and hide.
A rock had shifted, and a 40-year slow-motion landslide began. From tear-gas to Jean-Paul Gaultier, from cordite to Clinique.
Within months three gay newspapers had been established and two activist gay organisations founded. The first Pride marches took place a year later, in 1970.
This spasm of self-definition, affirmation and self-defence did not mark the beginning of the modern campaign for equality for gay men in the US and Europe.
It’s important to remember that. Valiant, patient, “respectable” pioneering organisations had been plugging away for decades.
In Britain men such as Leo Abse MP (who died this year) and the journalist Peter Wildeblood (his shocking, groundbreaking book, Against the Law, has been recently republished) had since the 1950s edged recognition and reform up the agenda. Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary had finally got his 1967 Act on to the statute book, years after the Wolfenden Commission’s recommendations.
That Act of Parliament, at last decriminalising — however cautiously — private homosexual behaviour, remains by far the most important single political victory in British gay history, and its supporters (including, among a minority of her contemporary Conservative MPs, the young Margaret Thatcher) needed a lonelier courage than today’s more fashionable reforming politicians.
There was nothing cool about the issue then. But despite all the groundwork by committee-wallahs and redoubtable individuals, still there was something different and new about the Stonewall upheaval in America. It was revolutionary. It sprang not from argument but from attitude. Pleading had turned into demand. A human group was finding its voice.
Twenty years later, in 1989, a group of us in Britain who had been organising a formidable if unsuccessful campaign against what became known as Section 28 (the irony of its enactment by Thatcher’s Government was not lost on us) decided not to disband but to evolve. I was one of the members of the first board of an organisation we called the Stonewall Group.
Our genesis was from the back foot — the need for a strong public voice to resist oppressive measures such as Section 28 — but our future would be front-foot too: to put gay equality and homosexual law reform on to the mainstream national agenda.
Two decades on we British have overtaken the Americans. After successive reductions in the age of homosexual consent until an equal age was reached, after the Civil Partnerships Act, and after a long and remarkably steady shift in not only the rules but social and media attitudes too, nobody would dispute the success of this slow-burning, 40-year-old crusade.
But neither the Stonewall riots in the US nor — still less — our British Stonewall Group was the prime cause of this big cultural change. The prime cause was, I believe, a very, very gradual shift in informal public attitudes in the West that had been completely unanswered by any formal or legal change.
Pressure was building, but Church and State had turned their faces away. Self-confidence and moral self-belief among gay people were growing regardless. Religious taboos were losing their reach and command. Rigid family structures were loosening, and more people were living alone.
And censorship and the regulation of entertainment and leisure was relaxing its grip, while, as Western economies recovered after the Second World War, people gained the economic independence to choose and buy their leisure and their pleasure. The means of escape were multiplying. Clubs, pubs, gay guesthouses and bath-houses, magazines . . . all these were springing up.
A young gay man’s journey of exploration when I was 20 depended on two staples: venues and publications. From the late 1950s both had been expanding and growing cheekier. But the law — as written though increasingly haphazardly enforced — was unchanged. An irresistible force was meeting a thus-far immovable object.
Then came Stonewall, the riots, the activism and the campaigns. The façade of moral reaction cracked then shattered: a slow shattering over 40 years. Cause or effect? Let’s just say that sails were put up to a gathering wind: they caught energy; they got motion; and the momentum became unstoppable. So that by the time HIV-Aids came along, a national panic that could so easily have tipped into fear and hatred of homosexuals tipped instead the other way, towards an almost protective sympathy.
The result? Our gay Rip Van Winkle, as he awakes this June after 40 years, would be unable to credit the new world he finds around him. If anything, the mismatch has been reversed: official norms and official tolerance have run on ahead of public sentiment; and the need is to make sure that the gap doesn’t grow unbridgeable.
But it’s mostly good. Mostly. “Steady on,” though, I reply, when breathless young passengers on the 21st-century glad-to-be-gay bandwagon start rhapsodising about the Utopia (they imagine) that awaits a new generation of young gay men in Britain.
Yes, it’s great that it’s cool to be gay. New freedoms bring security, pride, even swagger. They bring a certain care-less hedonism, and that’s not all bad. There’s more unworried fun in store for a young gay man today than ever there was for me when I was 18. Much has been gained. But something has been lost too, and I have memories from those haunted, nervous, repressed days that I will never regret.
How long ago it all seems: a different world. “Pretty policemen” acting as agents provocateurs in public lavatories; arrests, rumours and innuendo. Disgrace, suicide and lip-smacking court reports in The Daily Telegraph. Smirking circumlocutions in Times obituaries.
Those dark years continued right up until the 1990s. For gay men like me, now of a certain age, that Britain was another country and I wouldn’t go back to the bad old days of a post-1950s queer-bashing London for all the c**k and cappuccino in Old Compton Street.
But some of the heart has gone out of what really was, once, a community. We were oppressed then by what seemed like all the world. Now we are in danger of oppressing ourselves: with shallow conformism and gay stereotypes of our own creation.
Unlike a new generation of the out-and-proud, I can remember the 1970s and 1980s. I remember the fear: fear of exposure, fear of disgrace, fear of dismissal, fear of losing friends and family, and the physical fear of assault in circumstances you’d never dare report to the police. Fear of being kicked out of the Foreign Office, where I’d just started; and of not getting into Parliament, when I chose that path, because of whispers.
I remember the hole-in-the-corner political meetings at party conferences when I was parliamentary vice-president of the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality, but we called it CGHE because our members preferred not to see it spelt out — meetings the party refused to advertise officially.
I remember the strangely clandestine atmosphere surrounding even the gatherings that Ian McKellen, Nick de Jongh, Peter Mandelson and I used to attend at the Heaven gay nightclub at Charing Cross, as we planned media resistance to Section 28.
I remember a kindly Labour Deputy Chief Whip advising me to drop the whole subject — and Margaret Thatcher laying a sympathetic hand on my wrist, after I had told her everything, and breathing: “That must have been very difficult for you, dear.”
I remember the seedy pubs, the moonlit cruising grounds, sometimes so beautiful, but always the furtiveness and a feeling so insidious as to be almost impossible to banish from the mind, that what we wanted was somehow shameful. With Tom Robinson in the Fairfield Halls in Croydon, we sang (Sing if you’re) Glad to be Gay — but weren’t glad, really. And I remember the anxiety that came with the whole idea of settling down with someone, or even being seen with him often enough to set tongues wagging. Promiscuity was always safer.
Especially I remember the hypocrisy; the toffs, politicians and professional people, many of them married men, who turned up their noses at our campaigns yet were to be seen in places they shouldn’t have been, murmuring with a verbal wink that this was strictly entre nous, “our little secret”.
That’s no longer true of the world in which I move, and good riddance. But nor — on the other hand — should an arty metropolitan media-type such as me pretend to be writing about the whole of Britain. I don’t. There are towns and villages where all the ugliness of the pre-Stonewall world is alive and undiminished. It has to be combated now as much as then, and the Stonewall Group still has plenty of reason to exist.
But few of us alive at that time forget or regret the intimacy and camaraderie that came with prohibition and social danger. There was a spirit alive in those days, of self-defence and of mutual protection. There were codes that helped us to recognise each other. And despite every discouragement, many did find ways of being couples. Promiscuity was fine, too: our own choice, never stigmatised. Being outside the law and conventional respectability gave us a kind of freedom.
There was a need to be brave, and to see and admire the bravery of others, too. Anyone who was out had guts; and a kind of defiant, in-your-face outrageousness could be found among openly gay souls in every walk of life. I could believe, when I was 30, that the fight for homosexual equality should be a great and central national cause.
I think of course that it should continue today, but do I honestly rank it alongside economic or educational deprivation at home and abroad? Alongside the oppression of many Muslim women here in Britain? Alongside the search for ways of living that do not destroy our habitat? No, I honestly cannot.
It was all so much more raw then. Standing at the bar at the County Arms by Wandsworth Prison in a particular place on a particular day of the week — we all knew the day and the spot — with half a dozen plucky fellow queers, all friends, hooting with laughter at each other’s stories, was a reassuring ritual, and self-affirming in its way.
We all knew the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and the Union Tavern in Kennington. Mr Amateur Strip night at the White Swan in Limehouse, East London, though it continues still, had then an underground spirit. Today it feels like a rugby club.
There was fun, mutual respect and a sort of gaiety in the old-fashioned sense of that word that has evaporated today. There was no Gaydar, no virtual world, only the real one in which to find each other.
Let’s not go all misty-eyed about this, or ever forget that for every gay man who came in from the cold to the firesides of a near-underworld there were others who never dared; and plenty whose lives and reputations were wrecked by exposure. But it’s worth remembering that danger breeds strengths and kindnesses and the togetherness of a club. When the danger passes, so may that sense of solidarity.
What has replaced it? With the self-respect and freedom of the young, 21st-century gay man, has come a strutting self-regard, a materialistic consumerism, a vanity and a f***-off selfishness that I do not like. Spot the money, in a culture awash with disposable cash, where everybody’s earning and few are caring for kids or families. Watch the leisure and retail industry chasing the new gay spenders.
Walk down Old Compton Street and look at the boys looking at each other, or at themselves in shop windows. Or the peacockery of the Shadow Lounge in Soho. Note the sad arrival into the gay world of notions of celebrity, and lists, and coolness, and class distinction.
I’m glad about civil partnerships; glad about legalisation; glad we don’t have to hide any more; yet sorry that a new oppression has arrived in the form of face and body fascism, and the pursuit of pleasure.
Forty years after Stonewall, a young, confident, metropolitan gay man has almost everything my queer generation could only dream of. Everything, that is, except this: warmth, fellow-feeling, individuality and the opportunity for courage.
No comments:
Post a Comment