Part Two: Stonewall: The Criminal Queers Who Birthed a Movement

In part two of this special four-part episode, Margaret continues her conversation with Shereen Younes about the early fight for LGBT rights and how it was a literal fight, fought on every front.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, the
podcast about history and stuff and people and subjective qualities
like coolness. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. My guest is
not subjectively cool because she's objectively cool anymore. After an
introduction like that, anyone who gets introduced is less cool.

(00:22):
But it's not their fault. It's my fault. Yeah, you
really set me up for failure that one. This is Sharid.
I am back. You're welcome. Yay. This week we are
running Rudderless without our captain slash producer Sophie, which means
we can finally tell you about the basement full of

(00:44):
You can't say that on Mike, Margaret, I mean, you
know who doesn't want you to know about it is.
But also we can talk about fucking gay rights, not
because Sophie would let us talk about this. Also, just
to be clear, I'm not trying to drive so for here.
This is part two of a four part series, so

(01:04):
you're gonna be a little bit confused. If you don't
go back and listen to the part one, you'll have
missed out on the guy with the leopard who founded
funded like most of the transhit in US for decades.
You all got to listen to that. You have to,
you have to. You'll have to learn about Henry, Henry,
gay rights, Henry the Leopard right Henry. He also funded
the Dun Dun Dun, the Daughters of Belitis. And if

(01:28):
you've been following along and listened and did not google
anything today, you will learn what that name means. I'm
gonna learn what that name means because I was a
good listener and didn't google anything since Monday. Thank you. Yeah,
I'm going to make everyone wait a little bit longer
as we go on a side quest. A tangent on
this show that's unheard of, but don't worry. It's about

(01:49):
a lesbian crime lady, and it's good that's allowed. The
Daughters of Belitis were a response to lesbian bar culture
in the Bay. And which is the Bay of California?
What is the name of bay? San Francisco Bay. I'm
definitely well traveled. So let's talk about lesbian bars because

(02:11):
most gay bars at the time were criminal enterprises in
plenty more ways than one, because it was like illegal
to be gay but also run by criminals. Tommy Vassou
like cool criminals are like both, Yeah, and sometimes people
who are like both at once and you're like, oh,
I wish that didn't turn me on. I do not
feel good about myself, like a big like anti hero

(02:32):
kind of guy. Yeah, person a lot of anti heroes.
Gay rights was brought to you by the anti hero. Yeah,
there's a couple unabashed good people. But if you're being
faced with like terrible shit, you know, at least like
adopt some terrible shit. I don't think gir survive. I
really think that's like my honest opinion. I think so too.

(02:54):
Tommy Vassou was a butch lesbian gangster who moved to
San Francisco in the forties from the Midwest. I'm gonna
use she pronouns because those are very cool altogether. Yeah,
she she lived her life as a man, but I
believe identified with butch culture. Um. She was born in Ohio.

(03:15):
She lived in Michigan for a while. She moved to
San Francisco and immediately set about living her best life,
which means that she had short hair. She wore double
breasted suits with Fedora's. She drove a fucking Catalac convertible.
She passed as a man completely. She used the men's restrooms,
and she was big in the crime scene doing crime stuff.
Love all that for her. Yeah, she was a pimp.

(03:37):
She dated sex workers. I don't know one way or
the other about how she treated them. I know that
at least some of them she made her business partners
and such. That's a good sign, I know. Yeah, it's
good as far as pimpsco. Yeah, Like she could have
been absolutely awful to her other workers. I have no idea. Yeah,
I know. Later she was a drug dealer, selling emphetamine's,
weed and heroin. It's implied that that came later, But

(03:58):
I think people might have been implying that later because
people don't want any People really want to whitewash gay history,
even when it comes like why is drugs the line
that's so interesting to me? You know, there's a couple
lines they see people like avoid a lot um. The
people who seem to be written out of these stories
are the mafia, especially the gay members of the gay

(04:19):
the gay gangsters. Those are the people I want to
learn about. Are you kidding? I've got some more in here, good,
good good. The sex workers, the drug dealers and drug
users and the prisoners are the people who are all
left out of this story. They're not good for the
image what they think anyway. Yeah, and so then they'll
include people and be like, oh, this person who was

(04:41):
like a drag queen and be like she was also
on heroin and selling sex. That doesn't make her less cool,
It makes her more cool of anything. Yeah, not the
heroine's cool. Yeah no, yeah, it's it's a I think
it just like makes someone layered and more were interesting
to know that, like they weren't this one dimensional activist

(05:04):
person right totally. It's like when we look back on
the like fucking um opiate crisis that we're still in,
you know, people will be like, oh and then these
people who were harm reduction volunteers for no reason, You're like,
because they were fucking dealing with it themselves. Not everyone, right,
but like yeah, yeah, it's like I honestly think some

(05:24):
of that stuff unfortunately, Like whether it's like addiction or
even just like recovering from addiction, I think your empathy
goes like out the wind, like it just goes way up.
Like I think it just like kind of makes you
a more sometimes anyway, that's my experience, but it makes
you more. But if you're someone who's dealing with that.
You're saying, Yeah, sorry, I was gonna say out the window,

(05:45):
but I meant like out like up and out the windows,
the opposite of what I meant. Yeah, But like I think,
I really think it makes you more empathetic and more
like emotionally aware and probably like I don't know, not
that I mean, I don't think anyone should do heroin
just like to put it out their point play. Yeah,
but I do think that sometimes addiction has like a human,

(06:05):
like a really human aspect to it that I don't
think is like talked about enough. I don't know if
that makes sense. Well. I think that also, like it
puts you into understanding the needs for need of community,
you know, they need to like take care of each
other and like, yeah, the people who reverse the most
overdoses are our users, you know whom And that gets

(06:28):
left out of the story. Yeah, go ahead. I think
it teaches you to depend on people without shame, like
hopefully you know, and I think that's really hard for people. Yeah. Anyway,
So Tommy, Tommy and her girlfriend owned a bar called
Tommy's Place. They had a different bar before that and
it moved, but Tommy's Place was next door to and

(06:50):
basically the same bar as another lesbian bar they also owned,
called twelve Adler Place. The liquor license was in her
girlfriend's name, which is how I know that her her
girlfriend slash client, was a business partner. The local license
was in her girlfriend's name because Tommy's criminal record meant
she couldn't get one, and Tommy is the first openly

(07:11):
lesbian bar owner in the city. San Francisco is the
place to be gay in the fifties, and there's other
La Chicago, New York, a bunch of other places, some
cool shit going on too, but San Francisco had a
lot going on for it to be gay in the fifties,
partly because the Beat generation had been pretty openly pro
gay and or written about how great gay sex is

(07:32):
all the time. And there are a ton of these
gay bars. But of course, because it's all these gay bars,
there's the forces of reaction. The cops and the boring
people didn't like all these homos moving to town. I
love that you said cops and boring people. They are
they're fucking boring. Yeah, And you get this moral panic right,
because it's like, because straight people aren't boring. Homophobes are boring?

(07:53):
Yeah kidding? Is they get this moral panic because nothing
ever changes. Some parents got freaked out that their daughters
were going to Tommy's place and getting involved in the
butch and fem culture, and how some of them wore
mannished clothes and called themselves either butch or fem. This
is the thing I don't quite have time to go into.
I would recommend everyone read the book Stone Butch Blues

(08:15):
by Leslie Feinberg to talk about what it meant to
be pre Stonewall going to gay bars and like what
the lesbian culture around butch and fem was basically kind
of created these two genders where they would date and
things like that. That's interesting, Okay, very quick, very quick
side note. There's a book called Hejab Butch Blues, a memoir.

(08:35):
Ooh and I directed the audio book if y'all want
to listen. I think it's a really amazing book. It
was one of those like there's so many things that
I was just like, wow, this puts into words what
I felt. But talks about how like like for her
as a Muslim person, like God was like a non
binary like entity versus just like a he or a she,

(08:57):
and the way she describes it as like he's both
or God is both, the same way she is both.
I think it's just like there's a really beautiful way
she says it that I can't articulate, But if you're
interested in that kind of stuff, I really do recommend it.
And I directed the audiobook, so that's fun. That fucking rules.
I'm actually gonna most of the stuff I read that
as in a history book. I listened to an audiobook,

(09:19):
so hell yeah, and Stone which blues like shaped so
much of my like young queer life by coming to
understand like some stuff. And yeah, I mean if I
had red cut stuff like that growing up, it would
have really helped me not feel like a fucking freak,
you know. Yeah, yeah, I believe it. So you get
this moral panic nineteen fifty four, the police is like,

(09:40):
the police chief is like, we gotta stop all these homosexuals.
So they started arresting people in bars and parks and
shit like that. On September eighth, nineteen fifty four, the
SFPD raided Tommy's Place in twelve Adler Place, and the
charges are around drugs. A heroine kid was found. People
claim as planted. I literally don't know or care. The

(10:00):
media refers to the place as a vice academy because
it's convincing young girls to act manish and do drugs
and shit. And I know you're thinking, you're like, you know,
the police are raiding this place. I bet there's some
way that they can arrest a straight black man and
pin everything on him. Oh no, uh yeah. The media

(10:21):
was also like, it's a way to lure young white
girls into sleeping with black men, to go to this
wow gay bar. That's one way to really get some
bigots up in arms. Oh god, huh. And they referred
to it as white slavery and that's so fun. Sorry. Yeah,
it's kind of been repeated in recent times, just the

(10:42):
idea of white oppression, and it's just laughable every time.
But I know, I like, there's so many things wrong
with the words white white slavery. Yeah, because some of
them include the word for that is slavery. Yeah, like,
it's not worse when it happens to white people. Another

(11:02):
thing wrong with it is it's often code for we
hate sex workers. There's anyway, Yeah, yeah, there's a lot
that's that's a that's a loaded thing. I mean, yeah,
implying that slavery means black enslavement by saying white in
front of I mean that's already like a yeah, yeah,
a can of worms so canceled nineteen fifties media in

(11:26):
San Francisco. Um, but I mean, actually, yeah, fuck them.
But then okay, you're gonna have some listeners being like
my ancestors were Irish and they were enslaved, and they
were white. So there's always that person that's like reminds
you of the white people that were slaves, uh yeah,
which does not include the Irish and the United States

(11:46):
of America as someone of Irish descent, it does include Now,
if you're saying that because your family is in like
fourteenth century Iceland, you might be telling the truth. There
was a lot of Irish slave very, and like some
port the founding of Iceland was like I think forty
Irish slaves. Anyway, I mean, I just I have genuinely

(12:11):
had a person I know that looked like the most
aryan person I've ever met in my life, with like
a very like just a bunch of privilege, kind of
like counteract an argument I made about racism, because he
was like, my family were slaves, and I'm like, what
the fuck are you talking about? And that was my
first experience, like fifteen years ago with the idea that
people genuinely cling to that as far as like I

(12:32):
was oppressed too, because people why why people just like
want to be oppressed so bad they do because whiteness
is the eradication of culture in exchange for privilege. And
people on a gut level. Don't get me wrong, these
people are doing bad when they say shit like this,
But on a gut level, people are like, I want

(12:52):
to have a culture instead of this privilege, and so
like they want to trade it, and it's just like
we don't get to make that decision, right, but we
can like whatever. Yeah, as a whole other fucker, I mean,
I just like what you said. I'm gonna remember that
whiteness is the eradication of culture because you've put into
words something that is very true. Maybe it's been said

(13:12):
before and I just haven't been paying attention, but I
like that you said it because now I know it. Thanks. Yeah,
And that's like part of the whole like thing about
like you know, when we say like get rid of whiteness,
we don't mean get rid of white people. We mean,
get rid of whiteness. We get get rid of this
like weird Devil's bargain where suddenly you don't have an ethnicity,
you're just privileged, and like get rid of white privilege

(13:33):
and like I don't know whatever. Um, okay, very quick
side note. Actually, though, I'm gonna get hate for that everybody. Okay, well,
I'm already gonna hate for what I yep. Well, okay,
there's a Vastard's episode that I was on. Was it
on Bastards? Okay, there's a whole thread on Reddit that
says that I hate white people, that I'm racist against
white people, and I want all white people to die

(13:54):
because I said that white people ruined yoga or like
something like that, and that just like became a whole
beast on its own where I don't know how that happened,
but there's like people are defensive about that stuff. As
what I'm trying to say, the fact that like you
can say whiteness and kind of try to equate it

(14:15):
to like this eradication, and then someone jumps on that
and like thinks, I want to like genocide white people.
Just an interesting point in men genocide white people and men.
That's the that's what the threat is about. I think, yeah,
that's anyways, that's such a funny, funny, good story that
I put through. I'm sorry, that's okay, that's funny. Though.

(14:37):
After this raid, patrons were forced to testify against the
bar or go to jail themselves. Um. One of the bartenders,
a white woman, got six months for serving beard of miners,
a black man who was a regular there. This is
the this is the person that the whole scare was around.
He got five years for supplying marijuana to a miner
um so ten times the sentence and the bar's liquor

(15:00):
license was revoked and the bar closed. And the whole
thing was this, like, but young people come here and drink.
There was this girl who claimed that she'd been drinking
here since she was thirteen, which is probably true. She
was drinking at every bar in San Francisco when she
was thirteen, and she said as much, and they closed
this one down because it was gay. Wow, Tommy. The

(15:24):
rest of to fast forward her life, And if you
fast forward anyone's life, it sounds bad because then you're like,
and then they'd die, you know, right right, right right, Tommy,
got arrested nineteen sixty eight, so ten years later for dealing.
Fourteen years later, got arrested for dealing, spent five years
in prison, and then was murdered in nineteen seventy nine.
And I could not find out. Someone knows, but I
did not was. Now they will find out whether it's

(15:45):
a hate crime thing or a europe A gangster. And
you do prom for a living and terrible way to
go either way. Yeah, totally. Her spot wasn't the only
gay bar in San Francisco, not in the slightest. You
have a diner called the Paper Doll, which is mostly
a lesbian spot that was so crowded they cramped strangers
into the booths with you, which sounds like hell to me,

(16:07):
but it was a good way for people to meet
each other. You had Gordon's, a mostly gay male spot
opened by a guy who had worked for the Paper Doll.
Because LGBT people, but we belong together. We care for
each other, you know, we help each other start our
own things. You had the Beige Room, which was a
drag theater with trapeez swings hanging from the ceiling, and
tourist buses stopped at this place, which was actually apparently

(16:29):
a common source of income for fifties and sixties gay
bars across the country, as tourists would come and be like,
hell yeah, drag because drags fucking cool. Yeah, And then
you had the front, another lesbian owned bar, and the
front was really interesting. It's kind of the inverse of
Tommy's Place because Charlotte Coleman she had been in the
Coastguard and then she was an auditor for the IRS.

(16:49):
So she's like normy right until the lavender scare got
her fired from working as an auditor for the IRS.
That's gonna turn you, that's gonna turn you. In the end,
she was glad she was fired. I mean, you know,
I doubt she was like man, the lavender scare rules,
but she certainly was happier as a bar owner in
San Francisco instead of an auditor for the I R. S.

(17:10):
And when she opened the front, she ran the entire
thing herself, with no employees noon till close, seven days
a week. And in order to avoid what Tommy's Placed did,
I assume Tommy's Places paid off the cops. I couldn't
promise you that, but what she did in order to
avoid attention was she opened it in the industrial district,
like in a warehouse somewhere, and what that meant was

(17:30):
that working class men would stop by and get a
drink on their way home from work, and they were
all buds. This part so heartwarming. The working classmen, they
never disparagingly, like they weren't harassing them. But they called
the lesbians the fruit. So the lesbians called them the vegetables.
Oh my god, and that is the most precious thing

(17:53):
you've ever said on this rock. And then when ship
would break, the like worker dudes would just like go
fix shit for free at their favorite bar, the lesbian
bar in the warehouse district, and yeah, a vegetable is
going to help them out. That is so funny. You
know that one guy walked in there and was like,
I'm the meat and people are like get out, yeah,

(18:18):
or one person was like, I'm a tomato and then
they were like that actually means you're a fruit, and
just the long pause that they were like, yeah, he
got wrong. And then she came out as a trans
exactly so. And one of the front's first events was
a benefit for the lesbian organization. I've twenty minutes in

(18:40):
this episode promised, I'm gonna tell you about that's how
my braid works. It's just like I was on a ride.
I was on a different ride. But yes, I can't wait. Well,
you're gonna have to wait after these ads and we're back.

(19:01):
In nineteen fifty five, there was a Filipino lesbian named
Rose Bamburger and she decided with her partner that they
needed a lesbian social club. They were tired of only
hanging out in bars. I really can't blame them, and
they got together with three other lesbian couples because lesbians, yeah,
And on September twenty first, nineteen fifty five, they were like,
what is the gayest name we could possibly imagine for

(19:23):
our new social club. I don't know if that's actually
what they said, but they came up with the gayest name.
They picked Daughters of Belitis, based on a book called
the Songs of Belitis, which is a French nineteenth century
lesbian poetry book written by a guy named Pierre Louis,
who probably banged Oscar Wilde but was definitely friends with

(19:44):
Oscar Wilde, yeah probably, and who wrote about pagan sexuality
aka gay sex all the time. But he also wrote
this book Songs of Belitis, which he claimed weren't written
by him, but instead were ancient Greek lesbian poetry that
would found on the walls and of a tomb in Cyprus,

(20:04):
written up by a made up ancient Greek lesbian poet
named Belitis, who was contemporaries with Sappho, the ancient Greek
Greek penn sexual whose life is the reason we have
the word safik and lesbians because she lived on the
island of Lesbos. So the book when it came out,
Songs of Belitis, it was so successful that people thought
it was actually an ancient Greek poetry thing for a while.

(20:27):
I don't know whether eventually it was like surprise, bitch,
is this to me? Or like, yeah, but I already
had made it smart at that point. Yeah. And because
the nineteenth century rules in weird interconnected ways, Claude Debussy,
one of my favorite composers, wrote a bunch of songs
from those Songs of Belitis into actual songs, and his
dad fought in the Paris Commune, which you can listen
about with my episode with Miriam Roscheck about the Paris

(20:48):
Everything Connected. I know, Daughters of Belus, Yeah, which just
sounds like they belong in Vampire the Masquerade, and I'm
not convinced they aren't vampires. They formed a dads of belitis.
I mean, I just imagined like a bunch of badass
like Joan of Arc people, you know what I mean.
That's that's where my head goes. Oh yeah, yeah, like
like chainmail and shit. Yeah, just like fucking into it.

(21:13):
And they about their weird name. Some of the founders said, quote,
if anyone asked us, we could always say we belong
to a poetry club. And they had four goals besides socializing.
One education of the variant, which was their word for
temperamental love it. Two education of the public. Three participation
in research projects. They were into the idea that they

(21:34):
would all go volunteer for these like human sexuality subjects
and studies in order to prove that they're normal, you know,
and for investigation of the California penal code. And they
got support from the Matachine Society and I believe also
One Incorporated. They shared an office with them on Mission Street.
Madaschine not one, and they kind of similarly to Madachine,
took their super cool name and mission and went really

(21:56):
assimilationist with it, no say so. They encourage people to
dress and act normal. Several of the founders left when
they shifted away from their original purpose. But in this case,
the original purpose was social club and then it became
more activist. So a lot of the founders left, and
they they made a magazine called The Ladder starting nineteen

(22:19):
fifty six, using machines mimeograph machine. The Ladder like a
like a climate of tools. Yeah, yeah, it's not a tool.
What am I saying? It's just sort of a what
is it called? What would you what are the massive objects? Yeah?
I know, it's the Ladder. And they made this magazine
and like, as far as I could tell, the point

(22:39):
of making this magazine at first was to convince like
lonely rural queer ladies to come move to San Francisco
to expand their dating pool. I mean, I love that.
Love that's that was thought about, because I'm sure there
were so many of those people that were just like
waiting for the correct thing to just like jump on.
But also fact I respect the effort. I respect the

(23:01):
effort for sure. Yeah. Here's a quote from their first issue,
What will be the Lot of the Future Lesbian Fear scorn.
This need not be if lethargy is supplanted with an
energized constructive program, if cowardice gives way to the solidarity
of a cooperative front. Wait, can you repeat that? I
want to hear that poetry? Yeah, what will be the

(23:22):
loss of the future lesbian fear scorn? This need not
be if lethargy is supplanted by an energized constructive program,
if cowardice gives way to the solidarity of a cooperative front.
M Basically, it's like, we fucking work together, we can
fucking do this shit. Yeah, that sounds like it would
be like from the Daughters of Belitas, just like the

(23:43):
way it is worded. Yeah, I know, I know. And
the art on this magazine rules and it's worth looking at.
It was eventually subtitled a Lesbian Review, the first time
in a magazine in the US used the word lesbian
like in its titling, and they ran a mail order
for her to find lesbian books. They held the first
lesbian convention in the US, though cops came and made
sure no one was cross dressing. That's the weirdest whatever,

(24:05):
fucking cops. Yeah, and they organized lesbians to participate in
psychological studies, and then in the latter one of the
things that they did was spread information on how to
handle arrests. Quote, don't plead guilty, call your attorney, don't
volunteer information. In fact, don't talk to anyone about anything
that holds up. That's good advice. I was gonna say,
that's like, that's what we tell people now. Yeah, And

(24:28):
they had listicles like imagine this on the check outstand,
thirteen ways a woman can assert her rights in case
of arrest. Wow, their numbers, but that's just like, that's
those are the tabloids that I want back, you know
what I mean? I want those instead of Star. Yeah, like, yeah, anyways,

(24:49):
I respect them. I respect that well. In episode four,
we're gonna talk about a queer organization called Star Don't worry,
Oh Street Trensvestite Action Revolutionaries. Wow. Oh, it's like a
good acronym. Yeah, that's fucking sick. Yeah, I love an acronym.
Their numbers never get really high. The daughter's politism. A
bunch of different explanations are offered not by them, but

(25:10):
by like future historians or whatever. It was mostly for
middle class folks, predominantly white, but not overwhelmingly, so there's
very explicit racial inclusion. Many of its founders were Filipino,
or at least one of the founders of Filippine. I've
heard that two of them were. It's some of its
leaders were people of color. They had a black president
for a while. They were trying yeah, most Yeah, and

(25:32):
frankly ahead of the curve for fifties and sixties for sure. Yeah.
I have to remind myself that that's that's the decade
it was in, because in my head it was like,
without realizing it, I'm like, oh, seventies or like eighties
or whatever. But the fact that it was so long
ago is even more impressive. Yeah, but the assimilationist model
of it just didn't really light a spark in people.
And they talk a bunch of shit on butches and

(25:53):
gay bars, which is like where more of the lesbian
cultures is happening. By the mid sixties, both the Daughters
of Bilitis and Matachine are both getting a little bit
more Actually society needs serious changing, and so they do
start getting a little bit more radical in nineteen sixty four,
or they get more political. I guess it's a better
way to say it. In nineteen sixty four, the daughters

(26:13):
picketed a cathedral because a church guy inside had yelled
at another church guy for supporting queers, because actually religion
has never been united on the issues of gay people
in one direction or the other. And these groups all
together they get called the homophile movement movement. They used
the word homophile to emphasize that it was about love,
which is sweet, But could you imagine the fucking discourse,

(26:36):
like if this was on Twitter? Like right, so you've
got another one of these groups around at this time.
I'm sure there's more, but this one also had a
really metal name, the Janis Society JA and U Jis.
Could you imagine showing up at the like the big group,
the big thing that collected all the homophile groups is

(26:56):
called Echo. I think the East Coast homophile organizations are
least the eascast ones were. But could you imagine showing
up as like the Delaware Association of Guys who like
fucking other guys and everyone else is like Obliviator, the
Society of Destroyers. First of their name, you're Janis. Yeah.
So the Janis Society was a Philly area group that

(27:17):
had both men and women and They got their name
from the Roman god Janis, who had two faces, and
as the god of dualities and beginnings and endings and
just all kinds of metal shit. In nineteen sixty five,
Janus societal with a you yeah, Janis like ja and
you ask like the fucking movie logo. Okay, finally I
put together saying with that reference, I'm an idiot. I

(27:40):
was thinking of the white woman's name Janis this whole time.
But Janis is a really cool god. Yeah you say that,
and it's the fucking logo from that really cool company.
So anyway, but yeah, I don't know a company. It's
a it's a like a restoring or like film company
that like just do some really cool shit and like
helps restore old films. But logo itself is like a

(28:01):
two headed like a coin that has like two heads
on it. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Cool. In nineteen sixty five,
they held us sit in just like straight up at
a lunch counter in Philly. We're queer people and cross dressers.
We were being refused service. After about one hundred and
fifty queer people had been denied service at this lunch counter.

(28:21):
Three teenagers, two boys, and one girl. Just sat the
fuck down and refused to leave, and they were arrested.
So then the president of the Janis Society, Clark Pollack,
he's a gay Jewish man and we're talking more about
him in a second. He got arrested next. During this
he just went and was like, all right, you're gonna
arrest these kids, You're gonna arrest me. So then three
more people come in and sit down, and this time

(28:42):
the cops refused to arrest them, and eventually the place
had to start serving queers, I think. But if nothing else,
they stopped arresting them, stopped kicking them out right. Janis Society,
in particular, that guy, Clark Pollak. They published a magazine
called Drum, which was a gay magazine that got its
name just like the sources of all their names. No, fascinating, Yeah,
I want to know. It got its name from that

(29:02):
book Walden by Throw, and it includes this quote in
every issue from that book. If a man does not
keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he
hears the beat of a different drummer. And in this case,
the beat that this magazine heard was hot naked guys.
I love that these names have these like very deep

(29:26):
meanings that like you only know if you were in
on it. Yeah, I love that, And I don't know
the latter's meaning. I looked a little bit, but I
couldn't find it. I'm sure if I read an entire
book about the Daughters Blow to Right, I would know.
So this becomes the most popular game magazine in the
country because has hot naked guys in it. It also
gets in a lot of trouble. Its other motto was

(29:47):
less poetic and just as cool, put the sex back
into homosexuality. So you know where they would have been
in the Twitter discourse. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, that's amazing.
This scot Clark pullack A rested and sent to prison,
as did him running a peep show, and the magazine
disbanded because once again, sex work and gay stuff do.

(30:10):
It's not the same history, but it's a fucking huge
ven diagram. Yeah, and not everything that happened during this
era happened in the name of various organizations, in particular
what was called transvestites at the time. They're left out
a lot of the assimilations rhetoric because we're harder to
grapple with and explain something that's happening now. But while
organizations were more like trying to be respectable, the street

(30:32):
queers and LGBT across the spectrum, we're just fucking willing
to get rowdy. So now we get to talk about
some of the riots. Hell yeah, Los Angeles nineteen fifty nine,
there was a thriving queer community and scene, and the
cops kept fucking with it. They would arrest people and
they would print their names in the paper as queers
as a big scare tactic. It's like doxing back then. Yeah, basically,

(30:54):
that's so stupid. Yeah. In May nineteen fifty nine, some
queer folks were hanging out at a twenty four hour
donuts shop called Cooper Donuts on skid Row. And this
place was right between two different gay bars and was
totally fine with this clientele. It was a twenty four
hour donut shop between two gay bars. That's who you know.
Probably who fucking worked there, I don't know. So the

(31:14):
cops came in, which were fucking with people one night,
and one night they came in, they were fucking with
two drag queens, two male sex workers, and a guy
who was just outlook to get laid and So the
cops arrest a bunch of people, including this Mexican American
author John Retchie, and people watching this are like, no, no,
you're just you're just not actually gonna do that. So
they start throwing coffee and donuts and trash at the cops.

(31:39):
Oh my god, that is incredible. That's the right that
I want to enjoy. That's great. That's so good. Coffee
and donuts particularly at cops, which is like they have
that whole fucking stereotype because and then it works. They
drive the cops off with no one getting arrested. And
it's usually presented as the first gay riot, And U asked,

(32:01):
I don't have any counter argument, and I yeah, I
love that it's throwing down. It's a cops are trying
to arrest a Mexican man and some cross dressers and
sex workers, and they fucking what and they fucking won.
That's amazing. I'm so glad you told me about that.
The visuals in my brain are so beautiful. Yeah, okay,
this next one's real good too. Hell yeah, Okay. August fifth,
nineteen sixty one in Milwaukee, which I misspelled in my script,

(32:23):
nied you know who cares? Yeah, no One. Four Navy assholes.
They show up at a dare at an illegal gay
bar called Black Night. It was illegal asn't it didn't
bother having a liquor license. The four Navy guys they
refused to show idea to the bouncer, so the bouncer
was like, sorry, buds, you're leaving. You might enough hraise
it that politely. I don't know, so all four of

(32:46):
them jumped the bouncer. What they didn't take into account
was that the bouncer happened to be married to Josie
fucking Carter, a black drag queen who was ex Navy herself,
who was there to perform. She actually lived full time
as a woman, but it didn't identify as trends. She
had a parrot with her, just to set the scene.
Know that she always went to the bar with her parrot.

(33:06):
This is incredible. Josie fucking Carter, I'm adding that middle name,
walks out of a walks out with a beer bottle
on each hand, and just fucks up the Navy guys.
To quote her, this man turned on me. I thought,
I can't let him put his hands on me. He
was big and he kept coming at me. I thought
he would kill me in that moment, I could fight

(33:26):
off an army in a bathrobe. I let him have
everything that was in that bottle. He went down. That's amazing.
So the Navy guys fuck off and take the bottled
guy to the hospital. So a dozen more navy fucks
show up. They like, go and get their friends. They're like, well,
we're gonna go up these quarters. Yeah. In the bar,

(33:47):
everyone's like, oh shit, what do we do? Do we run?
Josie says about it later a quote, But we did
not run from a fight. We did not run from nothing.
What a badess. Huh beer bottle? Yeah, it's probably at
the bar, but you know, yeah yeah, I mean yeah yeah.
So twelve Navy guys show up and they just start

(34:08):
literally tearing the bar apart, like I think it's like
a makeshift bar or something, and seventy five gay patrons
just fuck them up. Um, a bunch of people on
both sides get hospitalized. The cops kind of miraculously they
arrest the Navy guys and not the bar patrons. Wow,
but the charges are dropped the time I know, I know,
but the charges are dropped immediately. Say yeah, um, but

(34:29):
at least the gay folks defending themselves don't go to jail. Yeah,
all right, another riot San Francisco. Now are all amazing.
I think there's always something that makes it like crazy,
and I know that the parrot, the donuts, yeah, like yeah, yeah.
Just the fact that she was like a Navy X person,
just like yeah, totally next ride on the list, San Francisco,

(34:52):
nineteen sixty six. It's in the Tenderloin district, which apparently
gets his name from basically being the district where cops
can get bought off through like old timey slang. I've
always wondered that that's what it's from. It's from a
New York thing, um, tender Loin. I've always wondered the
origin of that, that's you know, And now I'm like,
I can't. I like looked up the exact origin and
then like summarized it that way, and I'm like, yeah,

(35:13):
but that doesn't Oh well, whatever, my bad memory. Whatever,
let's go with it. Yeah. Tenderloin In in San Francisco
the center of LGBT community in San Francisco at the time.
It was also home to a large number of trans
women doing sex work there. Weren't a lot of jobs
available to non passing trans women then, unlike now. It
is better now, but it's not fucking easy as a
slightly yeah, like you know, it's like it's still a

(35:35):
point of contention unfortunately. Yeah, totally. Um. And also trans
women and cross dusters often weren't welcome at gay bars,
and we're gonna talk more about that later when we
talk about Stonewall. But like basically a lot of bars
were like no, this is for you know, there is
also like a discrimination with the same community that's sucks.
And it's hard to tell how much is like a no,

(35:58):
we're respectable, and how much is a know, what you're
doing illegal and we don't want the heat. So it's
hard to know whether it was like bigotry or cowardice
or some combination of the two. You know, it's either way. Yeah, stupid.
Neither are words that I like ascribed to me, you know,
I mean, like, just you're ostracizing and like, yeah, singling
out a group it's already so in need of defense

(36:21):
or like I don't know whatever totally, and if you're
in need of defense is one of our ads Sometimes
simply safe. I'm just I'm trying to make it. I
don't know. Maybe let's ads are a thing that support
this podcast. Um, you don't have to listen to them.
I don't care. There's a forward button on your thing

(36:43):
that's a secret. Oh right, No, I mean you must listen.
Keep wondering if I remember, gonna get in trouble. So
he's not a sop. He's never stopped me either. And
we're back from those ads that we all care deeply about,
and you listen to the whole way through. That's right.

(37:04):
So no one cared about the street workers in the Tenderloin,
at least no one at an institutional level. They were
a combination of everything cops don't care about. They were
poor people, people of color, trans people, gay people, sex workers,
homeless people. They any one of these things is enough
to get you treated like shit, and a lot of
them were all of these things. So there's this chain

(37:25):
store cafe called Compton's Cafeteria, and it had a location
in the Tenderloin. It's twenty four hours. It becomes a
social hangout for trans workers, for trans sex workers in particular,
and the owners suck and they keep calling the cops
on them and getting them arrested for female impersonating the law.
That would have sounded old timey if we'd written this

(37:47):
only a year ago, but is now back on the books.
And I think I could get arrested for going to
the grocery store in Tennessee right now. That is so scary, genuinely, yeah,
do we ever? Humans don't change, society never changes. It's
genuinely the same. It's like groundhog Day, it really is.

(38:07):
I think we've had moments, long moments of good and
there's so many societies that aren't poisoned by Western stuff. Yeah,
you know, Yeah, it's good to remember that our world
is not the world. I guess that's a good point. Yeah,
but I no, I do agree that there has been
stretches of goodness. I just when when you're reminded of

(38:28):
like the badness that's still there, it's just fucking upsetting. Yeah,
of course it is. I don't know. Yeah. In August
nineteen sixty six, the queens are hanging out doing their
thing at Compton's when the cops show up and try
and arrest this lady. So she throws a cup of
coffee in the CoP's face. People just kind of fucking
blew up all their pent up rage. Tables are flying everywhere,

(38:49):
cops are getting pummeled with high heels and purses, the
windows are broken out, the fight moves into the street,
a cop car gets smashed up, and at the end
of it, Compton's go on, I'm just like smiling board. Yeah,
I know, it's great, it's great, you know, and it's
just like, yeah, I can imagine you've just been putting
up with a ship for so long. You know, there's

(39:11):
like purses at high heels and like, yeah, starting it
off with a cup of coffee. I'm the next Ryan
I go to. I will bring a company up a
coffee because I think that's the most amazing thing. A donut.
Just yeah, fuck you, Oh my god. I think it
was during the altar globalization stuff. There's these pictures of
I think it's in Canada, anarchists in black block with

(39:31):
them donuts on fishing polesh tangling them in front of
the cop That is so funny. It was so funny.
So Compton's bans the trans community for good after this,
and so no one went there anymore and it went
out of business. Hell m, that's what you fucking get

(39:53):
you assholes. Wait, so I interrupted you. Unfortunately I do
that sometimes I pologize. But you were talking about the
car getting smash. Is that like what happened after that? Yeah,
they kind of like the I don't have the like
specifics about how the riot, but were they like a
like I don't know, I don't know. Um, I I

(40:13):
found a bunch of I don't know because I have
a bad memory and I didn't put it in the script.
That is the ends. Well, I'm going to believe that
they drove the cops away, so that yeah, that's my take. Yeah,
and I know that there was like, um, there's this
whole other part of this where this uh radical queer
group was also like picketing and stuff at the place.
I just it ended up being like a level of

(40:36):
complexity more than I was going to include in the script.
But and all of this and the riot also it's
spark change. It's kind of like a it's funny, as
I would say, mini Stonewall, the riot was about the
same size as stone Wall, as I think maybe maybe
it was smaller, but like it had this like fairly
major local impact in that people knew that the queer
people fought back. Yeah, and also more services and stuff

(40:59):
started appearing and being built and like not being destroyed
as part of trying to make things better. Then one more.
This one's unfortunately a one sided police riot. LA. The
next year, nineteen sixty seven, the Black Cat Tavern, And
there's this new gay bar. It's doing this thing. It's
New Year's. As the year changes, some gay people kissed

(41:21):
each other. Just terrible thing, be awful gay kissing. Just
don't just don't think about that right now and smile.
That would be a terrible thing. Some gay people kissed
on fucking New Years. So undercover cops in the crowd
just started beating the shit out of everyone, beat people unconscious,
arrested people. Customers fled to a nearby gay bar, where

(41:43):
cops found them and arrested them, being like, no, I
saw you two kiss I'm going to personally track you
through the streets. They have nothing better to do than
to go undercover at a fucking New Year's party at
a bar. Yeah, Like, are you shitting me? Yeah, they're
all fucking clown I know. I don't want to insult clowns. No, Yeah,

(42:07):
And two of the men who kissed on New year's
became registered sex offenders, and the Supreme Court refused to
hear their case. They argued that they had the right
to equal protection under the law. The law did not
agree with them. In response, this is the first group
I found called Pride, A group called Pride Personal Rights

(42:27):
in Defense and Education, which is the most bullshit accurate
the Personal Rights and Defense or whatever. It's Pride. A
group called Pride. They threw a protest and about two
hundred people showed up, and it was orderly because there
was it was way the fun contained by a very
militant lipd that Basically they're like, oh my god, the
homos are organizing and like, and this is seen as

(42:50):
one of the first protests for gay rights. I mean
there's other like small pickets and stuff like that, you know,
but this is um yeah, and organizational gay rights activists
also did a lot of stuff during this time. It
goes a little bit uncredited because it wasn't riots or
guess sort of dismissed as less radical because it was
less radical frankly, and I'm less interested in it, but

(43:12):
it's important. The Madachine Society, for example, got the Mayor
of New York to stop the policy ofven trapping gay
men for solicitation, and that fucking matters, you know, it
really does. In April nineteen sixty five, some folks from
the Mach Society led the first gay rights protest of
the White House. And I think this includes that guy
Frank we were talking about way at the beginning. Now
I said, just like woven into everything that isn't a riot.

(43:33):
In nineteen sixty seven, a man named Jack Nichols was
one of the first Americans to get on TV and
to be basically like, yeah, I'm gay, what do you want?
And he did this like he was a bit of
a like there's some contentious stuff about him that I
don't remember well enough to go into, but he did
this even though his dad was a fucking FBI agent
who said he would kill his own son if the
government ever found out that he was gay, Like if

(43:56):
the son was gay, he was like, I will fucking
murder you if you come out, and that Jack the son,
he did it anyway, and he got fired from the
hotel he worked out the next day. So people are
like they'll talk about they'll be like, oh, the first
game in on TV, the big Landmark or whatever, not.
This man could have been murdered by his father and
was fired from his job. So Jack goes on to

(44:19):
found Gay Magazine in nineteen sixty nine, the first weekly
gay newspaper in the US, and as protests in the
US in general are starting to heat up, especially around
civil rights in the Vietnam War. Basically like, you start
seeing shit change about what people think is how people
should protest in things, and you start getting the first
regular recurring marches, the kind of thing that later becomes

(44:41):
the Pride marches. In a way, people like to argue
about the exact lineage because everyone wants to fucking own pride.
Everyone wants to be like, no, it was us, No,
it was them, No, it was fucking all of us.
What do you fucking want? I'm like, can't we all
be happy that we're gay and alive and be proud
of all the gay dead people who came before us
as fucking literal battering rams. Yeah, I mean, in fighting
is always just what the bad guys always want. You're

(45:06):
doing the work for them basically over yeah, yeah, but
the hateful meetings wat, you're doing their work for them. Yep.
So there's criminal gays and respectable gays and gay people
of every gender and every type involved in all this
shit and these early gay marches, and they're called Annual Reminders,
which is kind of morbid and beautiful. They were held

(45:26):
every July fourth from nineteen sixty five to nineteen sixty
nine in Philiate Independence Hall, which is the building that
the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution came from. And
they were organized by the Matachean Society, the Daughters of Bolitis,
and the Janis Society, coming together as echo the East
Coast homophile organizations. The only modern group I can think
of with as good of a naming convention is the

(45:47):
Journal Baden, which is named after the medieval English sort
of third sex transwomen or gay men anyway. Interesting these
Annual Reminders, they're very serious affairs. A dress code was enforced,
jackets and ties for the boys, dresses for the women.
Gays were supposed to be presentable and employable. They didn't
have huge churnouts because they're boring. Forty people or so

(46:09):
came the last one, July fourth, nineteen sixty nine. Two
women broke ranks from it and held hands and one
of the organizers was like, no, you can't do that
and tried to like separate the women holding hands. That
this is why I talked shit assimilation of stuff. It's silly. Oh,
it's stupid. It's like you're really doing the work of

(46:29):
your oppressors. That's through all it is. It's really backwards
that you lose the plot. That's what happens. Yeah, it's
totally And by nineteen sixty nine, this time for solemn
annual reminders was over. The time for gay liberation had
begun because of something that had happened one week earlier,
from July fourth, nineteen sixty nine, a thing that people

(46:52):
remember more than solemn picketing. People remember when people threw
fucking molotovs at cops who tried to arrest them for
cross dressing and kissing other boys or ever. People remember
the stonewall fucking riots, which we will talk about next week.
Who don't google anything, Yeah, or talk to any other person. Yeah,

(47:14):
no spoilers. Yeah, but that was good. I always learned
so much, like not to not to show on any
other podcasts. But I I'm always so engaged when you're
explaining stuff because I don't know, you just do it. Well.
Maybe it's because it's a good stuff too. Maybe I
just don't want to remember the bad stuff, so I'm
like to get out. But but I really think I

(47:37):
don't know. I it's funny to be recorded as I
learned stuff. But I'm glad. I again, I'm representing the
dummies out there. I'm you and you're me, and it's okay. Yeah,
it's okay. And I was a dummy about all of
this last week. You know. That makes me feel like
a less dummy. Yeah. Yeah. People are like, wow, how
do you know everything? I'm like this every week I
read like two rats and like a ton of articles.

(48:00):
I am excited to learn how we upgraded from coffee
to Molotov cocktails because that's pretty oh yeah, pretty nice.
That is That is an escalation, I do confess, Yeah,
which is why if you ever need to now, we
already did that joke about making molotovs h But if
people want to make connection with your work, that was

(48:23):
that was you stumbled. But I will accept this. I
will I will pick you back up. Thank you. Um
uh yeah. You can follow me on the internet. My
Twitter is Shiro hero six six six because fill in
the blank, and then my Instagram is just Shiro Hero
And yeah, I made like a video essay recently that

(48:43):
if you want to watch it. That's what my brain
is on. It's called how can I be present when
photographs exist? And that's what I've been struggling with for
the last several months. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, it's also present.
It's especially important because Shiro Hero. The six to sixty
six comes from Shiro's birth year six six six, because

(49:06):
Shiro here is actually one of the original daughters of
Politis the Vampire. I was supposed to be revealed in
the last episode. But thank you for I mean, it's okay,
it's okay. It's good that they know, you know, it's
good that they know. Um. But yes, that is correct, Margaret,
thank you. Yeah. And if you want to follow me
on the internet, you can do so at Magpie Killjoy

(49:27):
on Twitter, or you can follow me on Instagram, where
I talk less about history and politics and more about
why I like my dog at Margaret Killjoy. And I
have a book out called Escape from Insul Island, and
I have a bunch of bands. One of them is
called Feminis School Band Camp, Feminist black Metal. And we

(49:48):
will see you all next week when we when you
all listen to our first or partner, or you already
listened half of it, see y'all soon. Yeahys, aren't sick
of me yet, just wait. Cool People Who Did Cool
Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website coool Zonemedia

(50:09):
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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