Gossip

Following the July 1969 Stonewall Riots, and recognising that it would be good to keep in touch, Stephen van Cline volunteered to be president of what we called Stonewall Riot Veterans (SRV). I volunteered to be its secretary-treasurer. We met regularly as a group, paid moderate dues and divided our membership into three categories: those who had actually participated; associate members who may or may not have been Stonewall Bar customers at some time; and friends who were willing to help plan projects to memorialise what early on many of us thought was just “a happening”.

Our main goal was to keep the 27 July weekend riots alive in people’s memories and to help plan a march for an annual commemorative gay parade.

The first night of the riots, few knew anyone else in the dark slummy bar unless they had walked in with one another. As the SRV secretary, early on I recorded memories of those who claimed to have been rioters.

Sylvia Rivera, our co- or vice-president, was the transgender activist that everyone seemed to know. During one of the first of the annual Stonewall Parades, the three of us marched at the head. When we walked past St Patrick’s Cathedral, we pointed to it and yelled, “Shame, shame, shame!”

“We are your history!”

On we walked over two and a half miles down Fifth Avenue to Christopher Street. Here, we stopped momentarily in front of the Stonewall Inn, then trekked on to the nearby Hudson River area, where the annual celebration lasted until the sun came up.

“We are your history,” Sylvia yelled repeatedly to the thousands on both sides of the street. “We are your history – your history!” One year, Stephen and I had to carry Sylvia in her red high-heeled shoes down Christopher Street, or else she never would have made it. In 2002, for The Villager, I wrote how in a rarely seen horse-drawn hearse she stopped the traffic as her cremains were carried from the bar to the river and dumped in.

Sylvia’s lineage was Puerto Rican (father) and Venezuelan (a mother who committed suicide when Sylvia was three). In his history of Stonewall, David Carter presents Sylvia as a far more disturbed person than I had realised. He presents evidence that many doubt she was there during the riots, that on the first night she was on heroin and sleeping in Bryant Park, blocks away. It never came up during our meetings, at one of which she forgot to take her pint bottle of gin that I still have.

Flame Queens

Danny Garvin was definitely a participant. He has estimated that on the first night about 150 or so were in the bar area, which now is a clothing store adjacent to the Stonewall. After the raid, few returned, but he did return for five days to protest. He said it was a myth that drag queens started the riots:

[There were] what we called a lot of Flame Queens there. A Flame Queen wore hip huggers, Tom Jones shirts, and maybe eye make-up.

They would tease up their hair and were very effeminate, like Emory in Boys in the Band. Most young people’s clothes at the time had become pretty asexual. You could not be in full drag at the time. You had to have three articles of men’s clothing on or you would be arrested for impersonating a woman. Most people were into dressing the new style, unisex. You will find that most of the Vets that are still alive will agree with me on this.

Sylvia and I agreed.

Poseurs who insisted they were at the Stonewall asked others to describe its interior, then repeated what they were told, seemingly having forgotten key facts: the sign-in book, the colour of the walls, where the dancing took place.

Stonewall Inn, New York, circa 1969

Stephen helped separate our members into participants, associate members and friends willing to help in fundraising and arranging projects to memorialise the riots. When I recorded his written memories while they were fresh, Stephen included the following:

The riots kept recurring throughout the weekend of June 27th, and that is normally interpreted as Friday (27th), Saturday (28th), and Sunday (29th) nights, each night lapsing into the early morning hours.

The first night was probably the most dramatic and the most meaningful to me, because that was the night I was directly involved. My lover and I were stunned and thrilled to see our own kind talking back, berating the cops, and throwing pennies. After seeing the gratuitous bloody beatings in front of us and being called names, we began throwing bricks and cobblestones at the bar, which suddenly became the symbol of our oppression.

The second night, Saturday, which we observed from the relative safety of the Rivera Café, was more violent and chaotic with more people, including outsider agitators. The third night was reported to be less violent. I got up early Monday morning (June 30th) in my apartment, a few blocks away on 15th Street, to the sound of heavy rain. I returned to my other art gallery in the country and the rain continued through Tuesday (July 1st).

Many say the rain kept people from returning to riot. It is my opinion that we were going about getting the week rolling and involved in endless discussions of the meaning of what had happened. We did not get angry again until word got around and the newspaper reports about the riots had widely circulated. Quite a few people returned on Wednesday (July 2nd). My only direct experience with activities that night was seeing bloodied people lying on the 7th Ave. sidewalk and against the buildings around the corner form the bar. There was action on Thursday night (July 3rd).

Five days after Stonewall

The riots occurred in the midst of a chaotic era in which people were examining their lives, searching for dignity as individuals, and demanding their rights. My lover and I had opened Portfolio Gallery on 10th Street in the next block directly behind the Stonewall two months before the riots. It was our first experience of a gay community and became a kind of gay center where news and gossip was shared.

In that gallery, I designed and published the first Gay Rainbow as limited edition prints, posters and very daring greetings cards with the inside caption “Gay is Good”. (We also had blank rainbow cards on top of the counter for the straight customers.)

A month after the riots, there was a rally in Washington square and we marched over to Sheridan Square for more speeches. Technically, this was the first gay march. Gay human rights was a need whose time had come. We were weary and angry about the constant fear and harassment we had suffered for many years.

(September 1998)

That was Stephen’s account, and it seemed credible. Sylvia, however, claimed to me that she didn’t know Stephen and didn’t remember ever seeing him at the bar. She was even more outspoken that William Henderson, who started a different Stonewall group, was a fraud trying to make money with the pink Cadillac he drove during the parade.

I tried to become a member of his group but was not accepted and, in fact, rebuffed as if I were a journalist and not a rioter. When a jeweller told me he had been asked by him for $1,000 to repair the Caddie and that others had also been asked for large amounts, I was warned that he may have murdered a roommate, was dangerous, and it would be wise not to get involved. Meanwhile, none of us saw van Cline’s lover.

Sylvia Rivera and Stephen van Cline

With money that Sylvia took in at a party that raised money for our SRV, and from a small amount gained from dues, I set up a bank account that required both my and Stephen’s names on cheques. It was my way of ensuring an honest and open accounting, yes, but Stephen lived somewhere in New Jersey. When he mysteriously disappeared, I could not withdraw the money because two signatures were required, and the bank charged fees that depleted the small account. Thus ended our marching at the front of future gay parades!

I could not get through to Stephen by telephone or email. But I did snail-mail him to the addresses of van Cline & Davenport Ltd, 1581 Route 202, Suite 179, Pomona, NY 10970; and to 3257 Route 10, Ashland, NY 12407 (518) 734-4357, asking him to phone or write. The letter to Ashland was returned, “not known”.

“Yes, I am a big fake”

Three decades later, the mystery continued. Stephen phoned from New Jersey (201) 337-4446 and surprisingly told me the following on 15 April 2006:

Yes, I am a big fake. I was trying to write a novel. I am not gay, but in order to obtain information about what it was like to have been gay in the 1960s, I joined the veterans’ groups. Only Sylvia Rivera saw through me, and I don’t know why she didn’t expose me to the others of you. Not only am I not gay, I have two children who now are in their 30s. My name is not Stephen van Cline but, no, I will not tell you what it really is.

My business, van Cline & Davenport, Ltd., is called that, but Davenport also does not exist. I did have an art gallery fairly near the Stonewall, so technically I was near the riots when they occurred. But I was not involved and the information I wrote for you and which you put up onto the web should be removed, for it is not true.

William Henderson, I think, is an even bigger fake. He could have been a character in my novel, a really dangerous person who could have murdered a roommate, could have been a real villain. Yes, you have every reason to be angry with me, and I regret that the Amalgamated Bank account was depleted because you could not find me and checks required both our signatures.

At least we meant well to make sure that funds would be honestly accounted for. Yes, I have a terminal liver illness and the prognosis is that I will live only a few more years – that is why I wrote you, in order to clear my conscience. Am I religious? Well, I’m a Christian Scientist. No, I gave up on writing the novel. I did learn how difficult life was for homosexuals, but I am truly sorry to have posed as one and deceived all of you.

The denouement

What’s it like here today? The other veteran group, Henderson’s, is now the only one. It meets regularly at the gay centre on 13th Street in Manhattan, but the Heritage of Pride group, which now arranges the annual parade, has reservations about its authenticity.

The Mattachine Society deservedly gets credit for having paved the way for the Stonewall Riots. If you Google van Cline & Davenport Ltd, you’ll find he still has a website as an appraiser of residential contents, art, antiques, furniture, decorative arts, and collections, that his company was established in 1875, and that he received his training with the International Society of Appraisers at Indiana University.

A rare group photo of Mattachine members

In 1985, at an appraisers’ conference in Georgia, he spoke on “Fakes, Forgeries and Creative Reconstruction: 19th Century Fine Art, Furniture, Sculpture and Decorative Arts”. As to my having outed a “gay” person who actually was heterosexual, it’s possible, but it’s also possible he was lying all along, even that he was a fake.

If even a total of two hundred or four hundred different gays were in the bar the week of the riots, you will hear and read more than two thousand versions of what happened. I was one of thousands admittedly rioting outside the bar only.

Whatever, Stonewall is a convenient word to describe a major humanitarian event that marked the awakening of homosexual rights organisations, not only in the United States but in faraway lands.

Related links

Stonewall Riots entry at Philosopedia

Gay Liberation

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