I Never Would Have Believed…

The Stonewall bar form Christopher Street Park

The older I get, the more often I find my conversations include the phrase “Forty (or ten, twenty, thirty) years ago I never would have believed that today I’m…” I suppose this is a quite natural phenomenon of aging. Things change. What was once unusual is common. Life takes us places and provides us with experiences that we couldn’t have imagined in our naive youth. Our personal history converges in circles of unexpected complexity. The convergence of retrospectively unbelievable circumstances was quite multilayered for me personally this past weekend. Let me explain.

Twenty years ago I never would have believed that the president of my country would include the Stonewall riots along with the civil rights movement as examples of American history to acknowledge and take pride in as President Obama in did in his second inaugural address. This is the government that fifty years ago carried out policies that systematically rooted out, shamed and fired gay people from it’s agencies as unfit to serve their country. Now the president was acknowledging an event considered a major turning point in the movement to change those policies. I thought I could never be prouder of this president. 

Ten years ago I never would have thought it possible that the President of the United States would declare Christopher Street Park and the area around it a national monument. For almost half a century this area has been a rallying cry and gathering place for LGBT people to protest, mourn and celebrate. What happened here in June of 1969 was not big news much beyond the neighborhood at the time. Most of the people who decided to fight back against the police who raided a gay bar run by the mafia that night remain anonymous to history. They would not have believed that their angry reaction to the indignities they suffered at the hands of the police that night would be the spark to ignite and unite a movement that would create positive change in so many lives many years later. This is history that always mattered to me as it has come to matter to LGBT people around the world. As a community we have always honored all those who had the courage to speak up and fight back that night. Now that history is not honored just by my community. It’s honored by my country as well. President Obama’s list of accomplishments in support of LGBT people is so extraordinary that this almost seems like just icing on the cake, but I think over time it will have just as significant effect on our community as marriage equality and ending sexual orientation discrimination in the military.

Park rangers prepare for their talk about the Stonewall riots.

Ten years ago I never would have believed that I would be standing in Christopher Street Park  listening to a National Park Ranger talk about the Stonewall riots and the early 20th century history of the oppression of LGBT people in our country. A small diverse group of people listened as he spoke just as they would have to a park ranger at Ellis Island, Federal Hall or any other historic monument or park overseen by the National Park Service. In the group were many young men and women, some presumably gay for whom the Stonewall Riots are distant history from long before they were born. That they and many generations after them will be able to come here to learn about and celebrate this history is amazing. The government agency that just a few years ago would have denied employment or fired any employees that were found to be gay, now is charged with preserving and interpreting the history of the LGBT equal rights movement for park visitors at a National Monument! LGBT folks who just a generation ago were marginalized by their government as second class citizens without equal treatment under the law — whose open expression of their sexuality could get them arrested, beaten up or ostracized by their families — can now come here and feel part of the American experience as previous generations never could have dreamed of. This is huge and made me more deeply proud to be an American than I ever have before.  

Six years ago I never would have that thought that I would know so much about what a national monument is and how important they are because of my experience as a volunteer with the National Park Service (NPS) at another of New York City’s national monuments, Governor’s Island. When I started volunteering for the NPS on Governors Island it was just something useful to do with my time as a retiree. I had a modest interest in history, but it was mostly an opportunity to be outdoors in a pleasant place and have interaction with other people which is something you miss when you retire from going to an office everyday. Over the last five years that I have been doing it however it has become much more to me. I have become more interested in the history of my city and country and what it reveals about our present. The more I learn, the more I want to know more and I’ve discovered that the best way learn new stuff is to share what you know with others. I found I really enjoyed interacting with visitors to the park and answering their questions. When I started leading tours of Castle Williams and Fort Jay just as the park rangers do it was especially gratifying. When I had a very engaged group who asked questions that I could answer I felt useful and appreciated in a very special way. I understand why many of the park rangers seem to enjoy their jobs so much. Now I’m excited about our newest National Monument, Stonewall, because in the future I may be able to expand my NPS volunteering in a new direction and be part of how this important place and history is preserved and presented. The possibility of someday standing in Christopher Street Park wearing my NPS volunteer badge and telling visitors about the early history of the LGBT movement and the Stonewall riots is a very exciting prospect for me to contemplate. The Park Service has made a great start but is just beginning to figure out how they can best interpret this history for the public and I intend to be involved as much as I can.

Lastly, forty-seven years ago when I was languishing the summer away in my parents house recovering from hepatitis that had caused me to leave school, I never would have believed it if someone told me I would discover the possible source of my illness forty years later from reading a history book. The summer of 1969 it was a total mystery how I had come down with a case of non-infectious hepatitis that is usually the result of poor sanitation or hygiene. There were no other cases at my school and I was always pretty careful about my personal hygiene so I didn’t think it was because of insufficient hand washing as my mother seemed to think. In any case it wasn’t serious and I never felt sick. I just had to stay home for many weeks and suffer extreme boredom until my yellow jaundiced eyes returned to normal. Many years later (probably around 2005) while reading Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter, I read his description of the Stonewall bar and how there was no running water behind the bar and how they washed the glasses by swishing them around in a tub of dirty water. He went on to note that there had been an outbreak of hepatitis among some of the regulars that spring that may have been caused by that filthy water. A lightbulb lit up in my head as I read this. In April of 1969 I was at the Stonewall and I had several drinks there. I had come to New York with my best friend on spring break from college. I was nineteen and thrilled to be in New York on a Saturday night in one of the hottest gay clubs. I had worked several odd jobs to earn enough for the plane fare to New York. I have a letter that my mother had saved that I wrote to her at the time describing everything I did on that trip — well not everything. I didn’t mention going the Stonewall even though that was certainly one of the highlights of my visit. I had been to gay bars before, but the gay bars in Indianapolis at that time were small and unsophisticated compared to the places we went to in New York. The Stonewall had two dance floors and was packed with well-dressed handsome young men enjoying themselves fearlessly. Or so it seemed to me at the time. I was too naive to know that the music could stop abruptly at any time if the police decided that it was time to put the faggots in their place. It had happened before and it could have happened the night I was there. I remember being kind of overwhelmed by the scene at the Stonewall that night. As excited as I was to be there, I was too shy and unsure of myself to strike up a conversation with any of the sophisticated men surrounding me. The friends I had come with were not so shy and I ended up taking a taxi alone back to the apartment where we were staying. My only souvenir from a night at the legendary and future historic Stonewall would to be a nasty microbe that would turn the whites of my eyes yellow three months later. This past weekend I told this story to a group of strangers and two park rangers in The Stonewall National Monument.