A key anniversary today – the anniversary of Stonewall.
In 1994 the Village Voice ran a special section, “Stonewall 25,” and Allen Ginsberg was among those who contributed. His contribution (excerpted from the introduction to Gay Pride – Photographs From Stonewall to Today by Fred W and Timothy McDarrah, soon to be reissued by Or Books, in preparation for “Stonewall 50”) ran as follows:
Think of the historic importance of coming out of the closet! Stonewall’s cry echoed round the world! Spiritual liberation meant gay liberation also, the liberation of individual veracity against hypocrisies of church and state and age-old social sadism. A revelation of actuality in midst of mental hallucination an emotional repression. Truth against “lies age-old, age-thick”
What was the fix to begin with? Legendary gay bars owned by organized crime paid off the New York police, and if they didn’t they were closed down. Something went wrong with the payoffs at Stonewall Inn. So the customary repression of gay social life was motiv’d by hypercritical greed and sadism. As the sign says GAY PROHIBITION CORRUPTS COPS AND FEEDS MAFIA
Who rebelled aganst this police fraud? We see hairy-chested guys with leather caps like cops, curbstone pixies on roller skates applauding the parade, white-clad pure butch lesbians, poseurs mugging in front of Stonewall’s graffiti’d façade. ”Gay Cruise” billboards above Christopher Street’s classic cigar-store corner, Rock Hudson elegies and T-shirt sociologies on Keith Haring’s shop wall, a gay vet tombstone, Carmen Miranda banana hat clones, transvestite motorcyclists, brown skins dancing, AIDS die-ins, Peter Orlovsky & myself musing in bed, 1959, arm in arm old lovers bald, Baldwin and marble Lincoln, Auden’s wrinkle-faced dignity, Gay Liz commix covers, thirty-something male hands sharing Affidavits of Domestic Partnership, magic homosex symbols flagged above Grove Street’s old brick roadway, a limp protestor dragged off by cops, a “Love Boys” spray-painted door, bath house queens and bare chest youthful cuties. Priests and Amazons, campy mitred Bishops and Gay Church floats, 1973 night crowds and balloons, Stonewall Inn shut down, a sign for “Bagels And” above its old brown brick front
These Anniversary parades and records thereof, like Fred McDarrah’s photograph(s) (shown above), are now significant as now [1994] we approach end of millennium. Think of present circumstances – recent revelation of the tortured and torturing blackmail psyche of the mad transvestite J Edgar Hoover in the closet – the late powerful homophobe N.Y. Cardinal Francis Spellman dallying with Broadway chorus boys on the privacy of citizen Roy Cohn’s yacht! Roy Cohn, himself a tax-free anti-faggot power head queer lawyer for the N.Y Diocese, organized crime hits, androgynous politicians & macho millionaires, gay pimp for the Director of the F.B.I. How many magic Cardinals & religious fanatic priests we see unmasked, their tenderest longings hid under the iron visage of censoriousness,
This year Cardinal Spellman’s successor Cardinal O’Connor still dares to put his Bible curse on gays, no public word whispered of his famous predecessor’s celebrated predilection for young men’s love. Thus while Catholic Ireland herself, through miraculous legislation, presently legitimizes homosexuality, the New York Cardinal scandalously prohibited Irish gay brigades from marching with the Green on St Patrick’s Day parades!
This degraded “Family Values” theopolitics has become a worldwide mask for mind control as against spirtual liberation. Hear the late Khomeini Ayatollah and his successor little Satans denounce “Spiritual Corruption”, along with Stalin, Mao and Hitler. Listen to Pat Robertson, his confreres and his guru W.A.Criswell, the fundamentalist Svengali of a “Biblical Inerrancy” cult, intolerant of any deviance from mind controlled by their interpretation of the “Good Book”
These vicious priesthoods are allied with beer magnates and tobacco senators in hierarchies of political ambition, demagoguery, power addiction, nationalist chauviism, military aggression, assassinations and war. Intolerant of other faiths, sexualities, and folkways! Fraudulent ethical poseurs set family members against each other & oppose ancient true family values of sympathy, tolerance, forgiveness, intimacy, humor and fidelity.