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1969 Mother Stonewall and the Golden Rats
(c) 1989 by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt
We sat on the curb-gutter around the corner from a Dance-Bar called the STONEWALL. He had wounds sutured up and down his arms. The army had rejected him for being “a queer.” HIs father had thrown him out of the house through a glass door. I’d left home forthe last time too. I was supposed to be on a ditch-digging road repair, summer job crew with a bunch of jerks I’d gone to school with (they would’ve buried me alive, just for the fun of it). So, I up and went to New York City with just the clothes on my back. One Queen had an enormous burn-scar covering her face and most of her body. Her mother didn’t want men to be “tempted” by her son’s beauty. We lived in cheap hotels, broken down apartments, abandoned buildings or on the streets. Home was where the heart is. Soem wehre able to get menial jobs. Some of us were on welfare. Some of us hustled. Adn some of us pan-handled (begged formoney in the streets). Food was where you found it. Many of us had gotten thrown out of home before finishing high school. WE WERE STREET RATS. Puerto Rican, BLACK, Northern and Southern whites. “Debby the Dyke” and a Chinese queen named “JADE EAST.” The sons and daughters of postal workers, welfare mothers, cab drivers, mechanics and NURSES Aids (just to name a few). Until properly introduced it was de rigeur argot to call everybody “Miss THING” (after this, it was discretionary USAGE). I strongly objected when a queen called “Opera Jean” called me “Mary” (but I’m a man!?) “MARY, GRACE, Alice, what’s the Difference. Afterall, we’re all sisters? Aren’t we?” (One in Essence and undivided). She* was head-strong so I stopped complaining. I ended up being named “VIOLET” by a black queen named NOVA. WE ALL ENDED UP TOGETHER AT A PLACE CALLED THE STONEWALL. SAFE and sound. All you had to do was find an empty bear can so the waiter would think you bought a drink, and the night was yours. A replica of wishing well stood near the back bar of one of the two large rooms painted black. The juke box played a lot of Motown music. We DANCED. THE air conditioners seemed not to work at all because the place was ALWAYS so crowded. We were happy. This place was the “ART” that gave form to the feelings of our heartbeats. Here the consciousness of knowing you “belonged” nestled into that WARM feeling of finally being HOME. And Home engenders Love-and-Loyalty quite naturally. So, We loved the Stonewall.
The cops (singular and plural) were generically known as “Lily Law,” “Betty Badge,” “Patty Pig” or “The Devil with the Blue Dress on.” That night Betty Badge got carried away. It was not only a raid but a bust. Mother STONEWALL was being VIOLATED. They forcibly entered her with nightsticks. The lights went on It wasn’t a pretty sight (How would children feel seeing their mother raped right before their eyes? Their home broken into and looted!? The Music Box Broken. The DANCING stopped. The replicated WISHING Well SMASHED?). No, this wasn’t a 1960s Student Riot. Out there were the streets. There wer eno Nice Dorms for sleeping. No SCHOOL CAFETERIA for certain food. No affluent parents to send us checks. The was a ghetto riot on home turf. We already had our WAR WOUNDS. So this was just another battle. Nobody thought of it as History, Herstory, MY-story, Your-story our our-story. We were being denied a place to dance togheter. That’s ALL. The total charisma of a revolution in our CONSCIOUSNESS rising from the gutter to the gutt to the heart and the mind was here. Non-existence (or PART existence) was coming into being, and being into becoming. Our Mother Stonewall was giving birth to a new ERA and we were the midwives
THAT NIGHT the (STREET) “Gutter Rats” shone like the brightest Gold! And like that baby born in a feed-troft (a manger) or found by Pharoes daughter in a basket floating down the river NILE, the mystery of history happened again in the Least likely of Places.
*She
*Queen argot, generic pronoun, in this case refers to a male person.
Please Xerox a few copies and give to friends.
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101 words that don’t quite describe me
crazy. flirtatious. unstable. silly. beautiful. sarcastic. caustic. critical. scandalous. dangerous. ambitious. intellectual. ecstatic. angry. mysterious. belligerent. childlike. calculating. irreverent. insane. emotional. dreamer. cynic. hunter. enchantress. ruthless. insecure. sexy. adversary. idealist. bitch. whore. darkie. morena. diva. control freak. prophet. wanna-be. renegade. delusional. goddess. teacher. lover. temptress. black sheep. blasphemer. princessa. hilot. salbahe. tarantado. puta. sirena. anak. nobya. querida. saint. donselya. slut. diwata. katolika. manhater. sistah. witch. profane. poet. songstress. scribe. storm. doña. bruja. babae. cunt. kayumanggi. rebel. shadow. divine. queen. home wrecker. dalaga. pinay. immigrant. babaylan. hayop. liar. heroine. child. stranger. voyeur. kontrabida. sinner. peripheral. body. tao. object. disillusioned. violent. other. woman.
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Holding a placard saying “I love my lesbian tita,” a 13-year old student Candy Caoili paraded with her lesbian aunt. “I really love my tita whatever she is and I owe it to her because she has been teaching me not to be homophobic ever since I could remember,” Caoili said.
Meanwhile, Mia Rasalan who was raised by a lesbian aunt emotionally shared her experience during the program at the People’s Park. “I was raised by a tomboy [lesbian] aunt with her partner and I am proud of it,” said Rasalan in her speech.
Yay for dyke titas!
Ms. Cook was drawn to Provincetown, where she ran a gallery and later opened a bookstore, and once Ms. Oliver was there with her, “I too fell in love with the town,” she recalled, “that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometime visitors, the many artists and writers. … M. and I decided to stay.” (via The Land and Words of Mary Oliver, the Bard of Provincetown - NYTimes.com)
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Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames (for example: Klippan)
Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names
Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names
Bookcase ranges: Occupations
Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
Chairs, desks: men’s names
Materials, curtains: women’s names
Garden furniture: Swedish islands
Carpets: Danish place names
Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms
Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones; words related to sleep, comfort, and cuddling
Children’s items: mammals, birds, adjectives
Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish placenames
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Her body finally decided to follow her migrating soul. She stopped eating. Organ by organ, her internal system shut down, until the last ember of life winked out. It was a week of deaths, big and small – Julius Fortuna, whom I’d known in college, passed away, Farah Fawcett succumbed to cancer, Michael Jackson’s heart stopped and the rosemary plant on my kitchen window sill turned gray.
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A wake is akin to a Book of Numbers session, all about who begat who upon whom. When a young man approached, took my hand and touched it to his forehead, in the feudal sign of respect, I blurted out, “who’s this?” Oh, the eldest son of so-and-so. Ah. Later, he sat beside me and asked how old I was. In the clarity of death’s presence, I saw his script unfolding. He would say oh, you look so much younger than my father! And what could, will, I say to that? That’s because your father is an alcoholic and a fool to boot. So I looked him straight in the eye, grabbed a number out of thin air and replied: 45 – which, of course, was impossible. That rendered him non-plus. Kiddo, you don’t eff around with the family black sheep.
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The casket lay on its stand, in its own ambience of entropy and time. Her caregiver of five years wanted my mother barefoot inside the casket – that was tradition, she said, so should the dead come visiting, the living won’t hear the footsteps. I looked a wordless reply at her: Oh my dear, we were born with the footsteps of the dead already echoing in our ears.
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the great american yellow poem
by Frances Chung
she heard tales about saving grapefruit skins for cooking
she grew bright under the neon dragon of Chinatown
she made saffron curry rice for friends
she attended a barbecue in Amarillo, Texas
she stepped around yellow piss in snow
she cut herself on a Hawaiian pineapple
she learned to name forsythia where it grew
visions of ochre and citronella eluded h
A member of demolition team uses a bolt cutter to open the gate of a tenement as residents try to fend him off, in Makati city, suburban Manila, on June 2. Hundreds of residents fought with the demolition crew that tried to evict them from the government housing to make way for a redevelopment project.
. (via j neuberger)
