OutCasting; Stonewall at 50 — the uprising in context (Part 2 of 3)

the first article written about aids in the public press was written by dr larry massett a doctor for a gay newspaper the new york native in may of nineteen eighty one and it was called cancer in the gay community that something was happening people were getting really set and nobody knew why casting public radio's lgbt to youth program we don't have to be queer to be here and our testing has produced a new by media for the public online at podcasting media dot org hi i'm casper an outcast a new participant june twenty nineteen mark the fiftieth anniversary of the stonewall uprising in nineteen sixty nine the stonewall inn was a gay bar in your city's greenwich village in those days please rate of gay bars were commonplace used it was often printed names and sometimes photos of people arrested during these raids being publicly outed as what we now think of as lgbt q in this way could lead to the loss of homes jobs and families during one such raid on a hot night in late june nineteen sixty nine patrons at the stonewall and

eventually joined by many other people rose up and fought against the police this led to a series of riots over the next several nights in the wake of the stonewall uprising new activist groups were formed in the cold and the stonewall uprising came to mark a major turning point in lgbt q activism pride celebrations around the world commemorate the events that started at the stonewall inn in late june nineteen sixty nine and this series outcast or enter talks with annie hummed a veteran gay journalist and activist based in newark city and is the co host of the weekly tv news programme de usa on this program we continue our discussion of lgbt q history and activism following the stonewall uprising and into the nineteen eighties this is the second part of a three part series the andy home welcome back to our testing like said real good to be here last time we talked about lgbt q activism before the stonewall uprising which took place fifty years ago and waiting in early july nineteen sixty nine and the aftermath of the uprising the gay liberation front and the

gay activists alliance was formed can you tell us about the purposes and goals of these groups and what they don't look a liberation front was very multi issue it went after every liberation as you can imagine the african american rights and women's right everything it just covered everything so it was quite a chaotic and a kind of burned itself out after two years ago activists alliance split off from g alive as basically saying we want to be a single issue organization there's no group just working on gay rights although there was that issue in society we just want to focus on that and jeering gay activists alliance was a very militant group they got in your face they have what they were called saps people think of the marriage movement started in the nineties as something they took over the marriage bureau in new york wants and destroy that is answering the phones they said no street weddings that agents say things they said people away as film of this you could look this approval mostly because once this on youtube and they took over the offices of

the daily news because they were so anti gay newark newspaper they sapped you if you were not a supporting gay rights and that was very brave some of them got beat up over it and the other thing that the gay activists alliance did which is so important in nineteen seventy one they had the idea what we have a human rights lawyer new york write that protect people on the basis of race and religion and ethnicity and things like that let's cover gay people in the human rights law and they came up with the term sexual orientation we all use the term commonly now right it's even in the federal gay rights bill which hasn't passed yet and they started fighting for this and the new york city council and bad ideas spread across the country it started passing in cities it bypassed in minnesota minneapolis in nineteen seventy four a passable on a big cities it past december at cisco in the late seventies when harvey milk and then but even though new york and see the idea of the bill in new york city it didn't pass and

delighted at sex i was there i worked on it for eleven years it was very embarrassing that it took new york city would you think of as so liberal that long to pass a basic gay rights bill and it's because new york city is really a very conservative city especially in those days when you think of brooklyn and staten island and queens these places were very reactionary that was very hard to get the votes of the council members there but we finally did it so tell us about harvey milk one of the first openly gay elected officials and a large city in the united states and harvey milk was originally a new yorkers from long island like i am but does it work to new york and worked on wall street who's got a conservative but then he got involved in the theater in new york with the public theater and things like that sort of double bit more hippie ish animal december cisco it open a camera shop on castro street which is the heart of the gay neighborhood there and because he was sort of in the center of the action they are decidedly want to run for office he made several unsuccessful runs for

office in san francisco for it i believe state assembly and for the city council but what happened when he got elected i believe the years nineteen seventy eight was when they decided to let people buy districts in san francisco rather than at large and that made it easier for somebody from the castro to essentially have a representative party won his election there's a wonderful film about it called the times of harvey milk of course it isn't his assassination but while he was on the city council he got the gay rights bill passed and a lot of other things are he was very dedicated to a lot of social justice causes he was very close to the labor movement but in california they mounted a referendum to ban gay teachers and not just ban gay teachers throughout the state but to ban anybody who supported gay teachers it was out wages and when they did the initial polling on it we thought we were going to lose horribly eventually we got the president to come out as a jimmy carter and

ronald reagan who was this right wing governor out there and was running for president himself around the time he actually thought this was going too far and he said don't vote for and we won so harvey milk and sally gearhart was the lesbian activist was as co chair we won that victory over italy was called proposition six and shortly after that party gets assassinated by another city council member who had quit the city council a guy named dan white then he'd quit the city council does it wasn't making enough money they didn't pay them much in those days and he was of originally of firemen so we came back to city hall to get his job back from the mayor and when mayor moscow he wouldn't give his job back then white pulls out a gun and kills them and then he goes downstairs and he kills harvey milk was hard even when i'm back on the council because then they have a chance to make it a more liberal body we had demonstrations in new york about that when that happened everybody was infinitely sad that night and somewhat

angry but then when people really got angry was when dan white was put on trial for that murder of harvey milk he was given a five year sentence people felt sorry for him because he hadn't yet a jury of his peers and services go people like him who had sympathy for him that night i was called white knight there were riots as it was a skilled labor and a lot of police cars we had a huge demonstration in your cupboard i remember that very well and the police by the way took a lot of retaliation against gay people after they're busting into the bar is busting up the establishment so it was a very perilous time party by the way he was an inspiration only the most visible gay politician but openly gay people have been elected to public office before him in michigan as early as the early nineteen seventies people were elected there but he was just the most visible and a lot of people started running for

office after that we started getting a lot casting we've interviewed gilbert baker who is the creator of the rainbow flag can you tell us a little bit about the history so they're unified just briefly on instead of what that meant for the movement a new billboard furry well as new york gears and he did this with a bunch of other people working out of guys that were put in garbage cans and they sold all those things together and it was for a gay freedom day which was their pride day in san francisco that he developed a symbol and he had had a big story behind each color are straight and the flag stood for some principle about love and liberation and all those kinds of things and it quickly caught on in sanford says god but it didn't really catch on widely until gilbert put together a flag that was a mile long that he brought to new york and nineteen ninety four for the twenty fifth anniversary of the

stonewall rebellion we had this big march in new york not up fifth avenue but up first date and you passed the united nations with this us a rainbow flag and gilbert really want to get this thing out there so the end of the march of the people there from all over the world he tears up the flag and the various pieces and gives it to people who were going all over the world and then the rainbow really catches on as an international symbol of the movement it was quite something he never copy right at the flag he gave it away and he made lots of different kinds of rainbow flags over the years and now you see a rainbow you think of day so insensitive to summarize the progress of the gay rights movement in the seventies you know from stonewall until the advent of aids in nineteen eighty one you know at the moment in the mid seventies initially what we were protesting was things like police harassment be believed even function and be in our bars and gardeners asians register with lambda legal defense in nineteen seventy

three applied to your state to be registered they were rejected at first it had to go all the way up to the court of appeals because they thought this was an immoral organization after all they were arguing for the legalization of sodomy which was against the law they should have been able to do it but they were never given our time and one a court of appeals decision to form this gay legal advocacy group but we were making headway police work on a leading salone support gay bars to go to that were mafia run that were back causes you were less arrest on the street let's not entirely but less so people are starting to feel that we have our own spaces weakened form our own organization's as places for us to go and people were letting their guard down they weren't as an involved in the moment then in nineteen seventy seven we passed a few gay rights laws here there and everywhere on the country miami had passed one i guess and seventy six so

anita bryant who was a famous singer who did orange juice commercials but also was evangelical christian she formed a group save our children to overturn the gay rights ordinance in miami this was unheard of to overturn the civil rights law through a popular referendum and so you know a lot of us got involved in that by sending money or expertise down there but that law was overturned by a two one margin and it shocked everybody it shocked us by god my enemy of wheat considered it a fairly liberal city a lot of jewish people a lot of latinos we thought we'd do pretty well we lost two to one and there were huge demonstrations all across the country about that especially in the big cities and in new york we formed a coalition that was when a gay rights it sort of reinvigorated the moment it taught us that we are now experiencing what you'd call backlash that this is not going to come easily even though we've had a lot

of successes we got gays out of the index of mental disorders and operating the bars anymore we had to realize that our legal status was not that great society and we had to fight and organize so back on a reinvigorated the moment and then lots of organizations were formed you know you had groups for gay older people like sage your groups for younger people like the institute for the protection as many gay youth academic groups all kinds of groups proliferated as a result so the feeling in nineteen eighty was there a gay community center of the anti overcome by the aids crisis so housing is crisis first discovered the first article written about aids in the public press was written by dr larry massett the doctor for gay newspaper the new york native in may of nineteen eighty one and it was called cancer in the gay community something was happening people were getting really sick and nobody knew why i know people who died in those days and we just thought they were dying of lung

cancer or something it was inexplicably so lowery wrote this article that kind of alarmed us in may and then on the july fourth weekend the new york times reported on a report from the centers for disease control about an outbreak of disease or coma and pneumocystis pneumonia in men and new york and i think was that also was a scalp these cases and offer them appeared that the cdc's morbidity and mortality weekly report had this and your times were a little story about it on the back page of the newspaper but everybody read on the july fourth weekend and they got really scary and i remember we didn't know what to do about that people were just getting really set and larry kramer invited everybody to his apartment in greenwich village well over a hundred of us to listen to a doctor named dr allan friedman kind described this was in august of eighty one to hear about what was going on it scared the crap out of us to

listen to this and how horrible that was it's not exactly portray accurately and the movie of the normal heart which i wrote a little more sensation was we listened intently we wanted to do something and larry and his friends formed the gay men's health crisis to respond to it and tried to start raising money about larry himself without the fire on that weekend holding a ten k and to raise money he got sixty bucks donated at some bad it was bought it got so bad that gm ac grew pretty quickly started providing services and a lot less advocacy we were trying to fight it on the medical front and on the service from as people are to be taken care but that was really almost nothing that can be done for people there were no treatments no drugs it was one the most terrific things you never want to live with people dying quickly and mysteriously they can even identify the cause of aids until about late at three early ad for they identify the age i the virus they call it something else that

but i imagine we didn't know what caused it there were all kinds of theories but nobody even know what caused it and then it took a little while longer to find even a test for the virus so oh everybody was getting infected and nobody you know some people took measures of protection kind of figured it had something to do with sex eventual it and people started using condoms and practicing safer sex even before they identify the virus but it was a tremendously scary time and you know people were even afraid of their own friends and their mothers i mean because the virus has an incubation period of eleven years so people are walking they might get at something that looked like the flu initially but then you are affecting everybody for ten years and showing no symptoms whatsoever and then they get deathly ill and die so it was horrendous all we did was go to funerals in those days and fight but obviously we're fighting hard enough because in nineteen eighty seven

lowry said we've got to do something much more radical and he formed the act of group and this is a group of mainly young men but many lesbians and non gay people who form this radical group to really fiercely fighters and they never stop fighting until the thing was brought under control massive radical actions lots of arrests very in your face because they were dying people were peeling off like crazy it was a terrible time and don't forget that in the mid eighties they didn't come up with the proper treatment to really control this until about nineteen ninety five ninety six when they came up with a protease inhibitors that were really able to get this under control and before nineteen ninety five ninety six people were really dying at a tremendous rate from age of the eighties and then all of a sudden you have these treatments that if you drop them worked on a pretty much keep it somewhat under control was to working on new treatments

is casting public radio's lgbt youth program pretty soon your idea for the public agenda online testing media dot org on june twenty nineteen marks the fiftieth anniversary of the stonewall uprisings a series of riots that marked a major turning point in lgbt q activism our guest on this about cursing serious is the better indeed journalism at this and he's talking with podcaster endure about how the lgbt q life of activism of all over the decades so earlier you mentioned the backlash to the growing rights movement in the late seventies but he's visited an even bigger backlash against lgbt q community sicilian politically so can you tell us about that well short and there were there were people proposing to put us in camps they did put us in camps in cuba william f buckley was a famous conservative columnist in those days he wanted people to be tattooed on their whereas if they had a jedi there were closing of gay space is closing a bath houses you could argue that some of this was justified as you know in terms of getting it under control but

it wasn't done rationally the main thing is while reagan was president united states he was in awe awful man at gay people and even if he had some gay friends like rock hudson ed koch was the mayor of new york he was for gay rights ostensibly he was fairly conservative on the stump and he didn't act properly in the beginning as we needed to even margaret thatcher in england did a better job you know she was arbel person just before aids there was something called legionnaire's disease that infected a bunch of people were legionnaires convention and it was terrifying and horrible and they did something about it and they took care of it in this thing they seem to be happy with who was dying gay people haitians injecting drug users and the concern of the society was practically no ronald reagan didn't talk about aids publicly until nineteen eighty seven i was there it was a vamp for benefit returned to washington and he started to speak and then easily said some things we were desperate for him to take some leadership and daddy said something bad about mandatory testing

and we started the bowl of a reboot of hard cause he was a monster i mean i mean he allowed he allowed that virus by not taking the proper measures to get out of control united states and to get out of control and around the world and where are we now wait for this thirty five million people have died of aids and thirty five million more people are infected with age it and you can blame it on people hated gay people and people who hated injecting drug users who just didn't want to get really busy about getting it under control so in the middle of all of this was the bowers v hardwick supreme court ruling can you tell us about that it's quite shocking suicide in eighty six it's right after we pass the gay rights poem york so we're pretty happy at least the new york and then you know the supreme court decisions come out late june sometimes early july and this is late very late june then by a five four decision the supreme court said it is constitutional to ban gay

people for making law by a five four decision and what a punch in the gut that was because it was going to keep us illegal which are a lot of consequences and i remember that night we had thousands of people in sheridan square inch are across the country we took over six avenue we sat on the street and block it and then it was followed by the july fourth weekend that we said were all gathered sheridan square again on july the fourth this was also the hundredth anniversary of the statue of liberty so we had ten thousand people who marched downtown where all the tourists were to celebrate the statue of liberty and we were militantly protesting that they said we were still illegal and there's a lot of consequences no sodomy was legally or but it was still illegal in a lot of states and what that means is they can deny you a job because they say you're part of the criminal class we can't hire you and it goes really awful so it took seventeen years to

reverse that the supreme court with dr lawrence v texas and that so the texas sodomy law was finally challenge seventeen years later i actually personally talked to george w bush about that when he was running for president i went to one of his fundraisers as a reporter and then pretended to be a supporter does i was wearing a suit face and governor as was his law i said why are why are you in for a while you were defending and the sodomy law in texas you said oh he thought i was a supporter he said don't bring that up that was not used that was not used know i mean sure they were arresting people right and left are suddenly they were you know very rarely actually went into your home to rescue or they could and they did in the case of michael hartwick was arrested in his own home and this other gay couple in lawrence v texas they were also arrested in their home which made a good case to challenge it then the supreme court flecked sandra day o'connor flipped around vote this time she voted to get rid of the sodomy laws by that time they were only thirteen states that had sodomy laws and they were reversed took seventeen

years for that well that was that was you know we're left with two thousand and three they could switch again with this new right wing supreme court they said if the states want banned sodomy they can be unsightly at the state's one not have same sex marriage they can start re enforcing the laws against courts can change and that's why we're in such a terrible situation right now with a trump administration so say like how your ears and seventies howard hughes some of that be done there's movement in the eighties the eighties were awful are dominated by aids has something that happened though aids was awful devastating killed us and get nothing positive you can say about that on the other hand you know we always used to say well for gay people would turn purple people would know that they know a gay person and that we could make some progress with what i did that because you couldn't live in the closet but yeah dates basically some people tried to pretend they have other diseases but it

basically put it all out front it not in the most positive light and a lot of parents afraid for their children and made us afraid for ourselves but it certainly got people out there and it also really made gay people fight you know up until that one of the first people to get a's were the people on fire island right because there was so much add half the you know into record drought there so they spread it rather quickly i had one of those and pharmacy or people have a lot of sex are those guys you know a wealthy you know thinking everything's fine i'm allowed to do this and then they realized that the government really hated them but the society really hated them it woke us up to that if you didn't know it already and people had to fight back in and aig it radicalized a lot of people and when you lose all your friends i mean some cases all your friends it does make you either want a dire fight and a lot of people for so i think him and that sense of strength in the moment even though decimated our numbers and god bless the lesbians for coming out and helping

us cause we could've gotten through without them we had a massive march on washington in nineteen eighty seven because march ever against demonstrations down there at the same time they laid out the quilts for the first time with all those names of people with aids so all of this starts to develop some sympathy and humanization of gay people in ways that hadn't before so let's go back for a moment and said hell during the aids crisis the laws can protect lgbt key people so tell us what was it about playing for people to lose their partners on and sometimes the furnace family would save sudan and take over the apartment and belongings and you know the surviving partner was sort of laughter while some was protected us and some didn't i mean the americans with disabilities act was used to protect people with aids and a disability and that helped we did have human rights laws that protected gay people in some cases but yes it was tough i mean here in new york and he says

we didn't have legalization of our relationships a codification of our relationships very few domestic partnerships laws by them and obviously no marriage laws protecting us you really had to fight to hold on to a place in new york we want a court decision that said if you lived with somebody for a long time and they really you know you can prove that you were basically that your partner new sport each other you couldn't get thrown out of rent stabilized thousand or you're protected and your leases protected that was the brush a decision and it was won by people like tom twain or not to be a city council member and a state senator so i tried to throw out a doctor out because he was treating people with aids would have protests and we would basically put a stop to that if somebody didn't want to bury people with aids or something there were rulings against that but it was tough we had some protection against what was a particular period that's all the time we have for now but will continue this conversation on the next edition of the casting any harm thanks for joining us tax revenue

and he joined us from his home in newark city he's a journalist and activist and co host of the weekly tv news program the usa is in part two of a three part series that's it for this edition of outcast and public radio's lgbt q youth program we don't have to be cleared to be here but this problem has been produced by the outcast and team including use of the distance and your alex i'm only dante lucas true of any casper our executive producer is mark sofas and testing is a production of media for the public good more information about our testing is available at a casting mia dot org you find information about the show was and links for all out casting episodes and podcast length of fasting is also on social media to connect with us on facebook twitter instagram and youtube podcasting media if you're having trouble whether its at home or school or just with yourself call the clever punch line that each six six forty eight seven three eight six or visit them online at the trevor project dot org

the trevor project is an organization dedicated to lgbt youth suicide prevention even have an online chat you can use if you don't talk on the phone they eat six six forty eight seventh repeat six being different isn't a reason to heger hurt yourself you can also finally got our site out casting media dot org under out gassing lgbt q resources and casper thanks for listening