Forty years since Sylvia Rivera threw the stiletto that was heard 'round the world, LGBTI people have come so far and yet not far at all. Heritage of Pride prepares this month to "paint the town Ruby," ruby being how a 40th anniversary is celebrated, and it's a great reminder of how much blood was literally shed for us to enjoy the relative freedoms we have today and of how fragile those freedoms are. Nothing brings this home more clearly than the exhibit "1969-The Year of Gay Liberation" that is currently being shown on the third floor of the central branch of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.
I have likely not set foot inside the Library since Stonewall 25, for its "Becoming Visible" exhibit, and I was struck once again by the beauty and elegance of the cool marble, worn by thousands of feet, on the steps. A different sign of the times was the presence of security guards-warning us, on the way in, about not taking flash photographs and, on the way out, to show any bags, coats and packages that might contain items that should not be leaving with us-very different from 1994.
Moving through the Library, with its echoes of centuries of knowledge, the collective genius of men and women living and dead, I thought about where I was headed. When I began to walk through the exhibit, consisting of documents and pictures from 1969, I was reminded of the existence of passionate people, who understand how to seize the zeitgeist of a moment and a generation.
The year 1969 represents a critical period in which a number of movements achieved a tipping point at the same time. A perfect storm of activism was igniting all races and genders to work for equality of Black people; equality of women; peace, love and violence, all to get the point across that we should be working together. And the world changed, and the world moved, as it continues to do today. Do we still have the same passion for change?
Among the documents are historical flyers, photographs and posters, in which words and images were committed to history at a time where it was dangerous to put your legal name on anything. Yet here were photographs, hand-annotated in ink, for future generations. Imagine my surprise when one of the attendees of a 1965 meeting of ECHO (East Coast Homophile Organizations) was someone from whom I'd rented rooms in the late 1980s in Philadelphia! Reading further, I discovered that picket lines, organized by ECHO, a consortium of the East Coast chapters of the Daughters of Bilitis, Philadelphia's Janus Society, Mattachine Society and others, helped raise awareness of the lack of equality for lesbian and gay people.
Other items include hand-typed documents that were distributed with the suggestion that copies be made. Publications were not available on the Internet as they are today, but needed to be printed laboriously by mimeograph or-gasp!-retyping! The fact that some of these documents have survived to the present day is nothing short of amazing.
NOW members and neo-Feminists everywhere may not remember the schism that erupted in the women's movement when the manifesto for the woman-identified woman appeared. There were feminists who were all for equality, but completely opposed to lesbians who provided the backbone of the movement. In retaliation, some heterosexual feminists identified as political lesbians, eschewing sexual relations with men to bolster their lesbian sisters. Now we all know that a similar situation could NEVER exist in present day movements for anything from LGBTI rights to marriage equality....
People who documented the movement, such as author and activist Kay Tobin Lahusen, are well represented, as well as several anonymous photographers. We are speaking of people, organizing along radical political lines, who well remembered the McCarthy era and the late night disappearances, blacklists, and arrests during that time. Yet they still met and planned and protested.
One flyer that stands out particularly for me is one that documents the call for a death vigil for Diego Vinales, a young Argentinean who was so fearful of deportation after his arrest in the police raid of the after-hours gay bar the Snake Pit, that he jumped from the second story window of the police station and was impaled on a fence and nearly died-all for the repercussions of living his life as a homosexual. Gay Activists Alliance leaflets, reading, "Any way you look at it, Diego Vinales was pushed," were distributed, and a vigil was held, which attracted hundreds of people who understood, as Sylvia and others did so long ago, that if something is worth having-like freedom to be everything you are-then it is absolutely worth fighting for.
Don't take my word for this. "1969-The Year of Gay Liberation" is on exhibit now through June 30, at the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. Take some time to walk through the exhibit-you could do it on a lunch hour, but make it a destination. Several times, as I contemplated my activist genealogy, I began to well up. The sacrifices these people made for me mean that we can have the conversations openly, which they broke open the closet door to make possible. Their sacrifice was not in vain.
