American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with Martha Shelley, 1 of 2

I'm going back in time, 1960s, late 50s, what wasn't like growing up in that time? What was expected of you in terms of your sexuality? I felt very alienated from the whole thing. The messages I got about what it was like. What's if we can do that without my sounding like I have a terrible cold? When I was growing up, I was born in 1943. When I was growing up in the 50s, the messages I got

about what my sexuality was supposed to be, what was the standard fare for females, I was supposed to grow up, get married to some guy, produce the usual 2.3 children, and sex wasn't even discussed in my family. I remember when I think it was in the second grade. I came to school one day and little Melvin was telling everybody how babies were made and my response was my parents would never do anything like that. I went home and I said, but everybody else believed him. I went home and I said to my mother, you know what little Melvin said? He was the shortest kid in our class. She turned beat red and I thought, oh my god, it's true. It was such a shock to me that my mother

would do that. I had said that my parents wouldn't do that and it was just awful and disgusting. Okay, so a few years later, I'm still getting all these messages about what I'm supposed to feel for boys and I didn't feel it and I didn't understand the other little girls giggling over guys and saying, so and so was cute. I could look at a guy and say, well, objectively, he's good looking. I didn't feel anything and when I dated guys, which I did as a teenager, I didn't feel anything for them. Even when I started having sex with guys, it was sex. It was not about passion. I was never in love with a guy. I didn't understand how these other girls felt and guys would tease them and they would play these games and it just didn't make any sense to me. What finally made sense to me was the first time I kissed a woman and I thought, oh, this is what

it's about and I knew that I was a lesbian and I knew that I would go through hell. I would go through fire for that experience for those kisses. I understood what that was. Did you understand it with words or just feeling? What kinds of words were used? There wasn't any words with just the feelings. I mean, I knew the word lesbian. I'd been reading plenty about, you know, I'd been having fantasies about, well, I had joined the first old women's judo class in New York City and I was wrestling around on the mat with women and of course I had a crush on the instructor and later on I found out that this was common that young lesbians would have crushes on their gym teachers but at that point I didn't know and this one woman in the class invited me, what we used to write home on the subway together, we turned out we went to the same school,

we went to college together. She had left school after high school and gotten married and traveled around with her husband who was in the military and then was going back to school. So she was five years older than me but we were still in the same level at college and we would talk about, you know, Zen and philosophy and poetry and then one night she invited me over for dinner and we ended up making out on the living room rug while her husband slept in the other room and that was when I realized that I was a lesbian and that the confusion I had was resolved, that was me. What was the word, did they use the word gay? When you realized this was that a common word? Oh yeah, gay, lesbian, homosexual, I know all of the words. Now, did you have a group to join or at what point did you get involved with a group of what

was called? Okay, for the first let's say a couple of years I started with this woman I was let me think now. I was 18. Okay, I know what you're getting at. I was 18 when I first started having a sex with her. That was in 1961. In 1967 I joined the daughters of Belitos after having looked around and been really disappointed, disappointed with the bars. I just wasn't the kind of person who was successful in the bars and then I found the daughters of Belitos. I had read about them in the book about homosexuality and I found that they actually had a New York office and I went there and that was where I fit in because instead of sitting around and drinking and trying to pick somebody up I could talk to people. I could get to know them.

Were they one of many, many groups or what was the daughters of Belitos? Do you say the name and how rare were they? What kind of phenomenon? Hello, what were they important? They were the first the doors of Belitos was the first lesbian organization in the United States, at least that I've ever heard of and they started in San Francisco with a small group of women including Del Martin and Phyllis Lyons and they had the main chapter in San Francisco at first and in New York chapter and I think there were some other smaller chapters in other cities. There were maybe 200 members in New York at least on the mailing list. Of course they didn't all show up for meetings and there were other gay groups but the other groups were gay men's groups like Madishean Society and various others but this was the lesbian one. The Madishean Society, I never went to their meetings except one time and that was after the

Stonewall riot so I don't know what they did. What we did was we had a monthly business meeting. We would have monthly social, once in a while we'd have a dance and we would have these meetings where we'd have a guest speaker. The guest speaker was sometimes a friendly psychologist who was there to assure us that we weren't crazy. Sometimes it was this one couple from New Jersey that had a long-standing relationship and they were there to tell us how to make a lesbian marriage work. I forget what the other guest speakers were but that was essentially the ones that happened over and over again. We participated in the, I think there were five of them all together, demonstrations in Philadelphia and Independence Hall where a few of us would get dressed up in

skirts and blouses and the guys would all have to wear you know from the gay men's organizations would have to wear suits and ties and we'd walk around with neatly printed picket signs saying equal rikes for homosexuals on July 4th. I went to one of those things and after that I swore I'd never do it again because I did not like on July 4th in a hot, sweltering day, parading around in a skirt nylons and a white blouse. While all of these vacationers were standing there eating ice cream and looking at us like we were critters in a zoo. I mean were you, were you kind of, why were they staring at you? What was it providing for a lot of onlookers? I don't know what they were thinking. I suppose some of them thought you know wow look at the queers kind of like a freak show. Some of them might have been gay themselves and you know astonished that other people,

that people would be out there doing this. What it did for the movement in general was there was some, it showed the world I suppose that there were some people who were courageous enough to stand up in public and say we are homosexuals and that was an important first step. But what is the symbolism of the jackets and ties in the blouses and why we wore the jackets and ties and blouses we were trying to show the world that we were ordinary normal citizens like anybody else with just this slight difference, like being left handed instead of right handed. I can do it. And also like to tap a little bit to like what that means you feel how bugged you a little. Okay. From a personal standpoint. Sure. So you wore a blouse? Ready? He's fine. Okay.

Why I didn't wear, like wearing that blouse and skirt, I had to wear those things to work. And it was 1968, the demonstration that I went to at Independence Hall. We were trying to prove we gay people that we were just the same as everybody else only a little bit different like being left handed instead of right handed. And I didn't believe it for a second. Not about other gay people. I mean, there were plenty of gay people who were kind of like that or who wanted so much to be like that. They wanted to have the house with the white picket fence and the good job and fit into American society the way it was. And I had become very radicalized in that time. I no longer believed in that system. I believed in that the system had to be changed drastically. And that the American society, you know, segregation that, you know, was still being

fought about the Vietnam War that I'd been demonstrating against for some year, if I think for the last four years, all of the rules that I had grown up with and that I had hated in my guts were other people were fighting against and saying, no, it doesn't have to be this way. There was the hippie movement, there was the summer of love, all of that. And that felt more real to me. That was more of what I wanted to be than the civil service job with the white blouse and all of that. That makes sense. So in other words, the turmoil of the time was providing you with these examples and inspiration or they think, you know, what were you, what kind of energy did it give you looking around at black people fighting women live? Okay. What I had seen was that no matter how hard black people fought to try to be or how nice they were. I don't know

if you remember the John Bias song, it isn't nice to block the doorway, it isn't nice to go to jail, there are nicer ways to do it, but the nice ways always fail. And it had become very clear at that point that no matter how hard black people tried to be nice, there was an awful lot of white people that weren't going to let it happen. And it was only by being less than nice, by pushing hard, by being really who we were, whether they were being black people who they were, that we were going to get anywhere in this world. Black people gave people women too. Certainly being nice as women got us nothing but more dirty diapers. Very, very. Did you conceive of a, the possibility of a separate movement? I mean, a real movement with, I did, were you frustrated with the kind of slow pace of gays achieving

any kind of civil rights or places of society? Did you walk around feeling a press where you were of the laws against you for this or that? Okay, well how I felt, I didn't feel that it's not so much that I felt I was frustrated with the slow pace of it. I didn't even feel that we were making progress. I felt that what I was doing on those marches in Philadelphia, that one march that I went to at Philadelphia, that one little protest march, was being a phony. I was pretending to want to be accepted into something I didn't want, really want any part of. And I didn't think it was going to do any good anyway. So when the Stonewall riot happened, it was like an explosion in my head, it was like, yes. And besides that, before the Stonewall riot, after that march, but before the Stonewall riot, I was working at Barnard College as a secretary to the general secretary there,

which was essentially a fundraising job that my boss did. And I was hanging out with Steve Donaldson of the student homophile league. And we were having an affair just for the hell of it, just to thumb our noses at the world. Not because we were in love with each other or even that it was good sex or anything. It was just we were being young brats. And the great gay movement couldn't really throw us out because we were perfectly willing to stand up in public and be on TV and say we were gay, even if we were having an affair with each other or whoever else we wanted. Anyway, Steve turned me on to LSD. And that literally blew my mind to use that old expression. I began to see that there were other ways of looking at the world. I literally joined the counterculture. I dropped out at the end of that year at Barnard. Just before the Stonewall riot,

I did not accept another job for the next year and I moved down to the Lower East Side and began to work part-time and ended up being a full-time movement organizer. What was the homophile movement? The homophile movement before Stonewall was essentially the Madison Society and Daughters of Beledice and all of these other little gay organizations, some of which were just two people in a memograph machine, two men or two women who were a couple and who would send out right articles and put out the latter, which was the magazine of the Daughters of Beledice. And it was all about civil rights for gay people. The difference between that and the gay liberation front is that what we were was a radical organization. We were for overturning the system and liberation for everybody, not just civil rights, but well, we were utopian, complete

liberation, overturning the capitalist system, economic equality, overturning racism, ending the war. You know, all of these things felt like equally important that it wasn't just, we weren't just a one-issue organization. Did you go back to sort of your time, perhaps, I'm not sure if you were a barter than were you ever sent to a psychiatrist and you have a story about how you partook in an abnormal psychology course? Okay, when I was in high school, my trigonometry teacher was worried about me because I was they dreamy in class. And so I got sent to a therapist, but it didn't have anything to do with being gay. It was just that they were worried about me and they were worried about a lot of kids at Bronx High School of Science because we had high suicide attempts and actual suicides.

It was nerd school. It was a whole bunch of bright kids being pressured by overachieving parents. So parents who wanted the kids to overachieve and there was so much psychological pressure on the kids. So they were worried about me that I might end up like one of those kids. I did that for a couple of years and then stopped doing therapy and you know, moved on with my life. But when I was in Daughters of Beletus, there were these abnormal psych teachers who would call up and ask for a guest speaker and I would go to an abnormal psych class and talk about being gay and why as far as I was concerned, it was not abnormal and that what normal was had to do with being you know in the middle of the bell curve and there were some people at one end and some people at the other and this and you know like everybody in some way or another is not exactly in the middle in terms of whatever norms you set up and what I would do in those classes would take

I would take a piece of paper and tear it into little squares and I'd pass them out to the kids. Let's say there were 30 kids in the room and say and ask them to write down if they had you know sexual experience with their own sex sexual experience with the opposite sex or both but you know no names or anything and then fold it up and hand it back to me and then I unfold them and I'd say well this class is pretty much the same as every other class the majority or heterosexualness two or three people who are not and of course that would leave the kids looking at each other wondering which ones are the gay ones and the gay ones feeling like they're not alone and that was the whole point. Why did they have you go to the same class? Because the reason they had me go to these classes that nobody else wanted to and daughters of Belitta's the majority of the people there would not go and be in public. They wouldn't they were afraid they'd lose their jobs which was a very realistic fear. They

would be afraid of being kicked out by their parents or alienating their families and people very often were you know lost their jobs landlords kicked them out of their apartments people ended up in jails for being gay so people had a lot of reason to be afraid and the more you had invested in the system the more frightened people were. It's one woman that I had an affair with and when I was in daughters of Belitta's who was older than me. We were driving along on a car she was driving I didn't know how to drive at that point. Cut. She was driving she okay she was driving I didn't know how to drive at that point and I reached over and took her hand we were in a car and she got frightened she wouldn't do it she was afraid somebody would see she had a technical writer job and she was working for some kind of

company that was related to defense or something and she was afraid she had a security clearance and I had nothing to lose if I lost my secretarial job I could always get another one. So you were willing now I think I may just not be getting this but I just want to be clear but you were brought to the abnormal side classes as so that you could do the paper thing or as somebody as a guest speaker I was brought to the abnormal because I was a member of daughters of Belitta's I was they asked for a spokesperson and I was the one who was the public speaker when WOR radio was looking for a spokesperson I was the one when there was some kind of a TV debate I went on TV and I debated these two lunatics psychiatrist I still remember them one of them wanted to start an institute for reforming homosexuals and I forget what the other one wanted but I had complete

contempt for these guys I thought they are trying to do something that I thought was impossible which was to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals and they are trying to get funding to do all of this to torture people with you know a verse of conditioning electroshock therapy or whatever horrible things they were going to do so I went on TV and I debated them but they were just I mean they were standing up for some sort of party line that was backed up by the AMA or whatever community. They were backed up by the American Psychological Association that Can you say that like just how many of the sense forget them because we might not agree with who they are. The Psychiatrists. What was the line? The Psych in those days the psychiatrist all had this notion that homosexuality was a mental disorder and that it was brought about by let me think now a distant father and an overprotective mother in other words parents who didn't fit the roles that they were that they were supposed to

fit and therefore they didn't model the right kind of roles for their children and so that was what caused us to be gay. I think that really and so the AMA was the American Psychiatric Association that was that had this policy or this definition and I guess they were related to the AMA because they're medical doctors. And what how would they sometimes treat how bad did it get? What they would do these psychiatrists is I mean the ones who thought that this was a thing to do was they would try to talk you into being heterosexual if that didn't work they would do things like a verse of conditioning you know show you pornography of that would be gay pornography and then give you an electric shock and then show you straight pornography and that was supposed to be okay and you didn't get an electric shock I suppose you got a lollipop or something.

It's a little hard to believe it's just feels like the dark ages it's not so long ago it's not so long ago and it could and it's happening in other countries like right now for instance in Iran where it's we buffer on yeah we there's only so much but you know so now that you know you mentioned that lesbian bars that you didn't particularly like going to can you describe them and start one there were these places. When I first started trying to find out the lesbians before I got to daughters of belitos I went to the bars a couple of times specifically to what I heard of called the sea colony and the sea colony was in the west village you had to know where it was because the windows were blacked out it didn't say this I think it did say the sea colony but the sign wasn't lit up and you walked in there

blacked out again you know you couldn't see through the windows and there were these women and it was dimly lit you paid extra money for overpriced drinks everybody knew that all of these bars were owned by the mafia and I remember going in there and looking around and I didn't fit in at all the women who were there who seemed to be doing well would dressed either the quote feminine ones would dress kind of like sturdises and the butch ones would dress in suits kind of male suits and I I just was like completely out of it I wore my blue jeans and my best plaid shirt and did not fit in at all I remember one time I sat down next to the woman to a woman at the bar and stumbled to try to make conversation with her and she was I guess she was German and there was another woman on the other side of me who I guess must have also been German and

they took one looked at me and the two of them started singing Deutschland uberalus and I got up and walked out and I never went back where these places dark light they were these bars were dark they were dimly lit there was a back room where you could pay extra money and then go in and dance with another woman and you had to pay extra to get in there and I did that I think once or twice I hated it I hated those places I never I never felt comfortable I never connected with anyone there politically did it bug you that the you know bother you that the mafia was involved was that when you were at that relationship I don't know if I articulated at that point that it pissed me off that the mafia owned the bars I think at that point it was that what it said to me is that we gave people were outlaws

as societies was telling us that we were criminals and that the only people who would deal with us were other criminals I hated that we were being exploited by the mafia I had no use for the mafia either and when the Gay Liberation Front came into being and we started running our own dances and charging you know 50 cents for a beer and a quarter for a soda um the mafia hated that they tried to stop us but they couldn't um it raids you have any recollections of the bars being raided and do you have any feelings about the police would sometimes raid the bars I was never in one because I didn't patronize them very much I heard about that from other people and usually those things would happen before an election um the whoever was running for office or whoever was trying to get reelected mostly would round up the prostitutes on 42nd Street and bust the gay bars and then they'd have headlines

about how they were cleaning up the city and getting rid of vice and of course as soon as the election was over it would all die down the prostitutes would be out again applying their trade and gay people I suppose would go back to what they were doing except some of the guys who got and was mostly guys who got arrested would be um have lost their jobs they'd be kicked out by their parents they'd be kicked out of their apartments and some of them committed suicide it was um real persecution after Gay Liberation Front thinks changed one time they raided a bar and this got and they took these guys to jail and this guy the Diego Vinales was here from some other country south america and he was here illegally and he was terrified and he ran and jumped out of the precinct window wherever he was and impaled himself on offense and it was taken to the hospital he survived miraculously and we we Gay Liberation Front people did a lot of

demonstrating about that and they I think they ended up letting him stay in this country because I think it was a death penalty or something where he came from but we were furious was there anything else that made you you know no problem okay any other outrageous laws or ways that cops would treat lesbians or gay people that you know that you know we're just people don't people today can't imagine do you think it's upset that you might think later the way cops treated us and continued to treat gay people you know for some time uh after the gay liberation movement was outrageous people demonstrated they in fact they were riots in san francisco about it um it took a long time and in san francisco what changed really

was they started hiring gay people gay cops so there are a lot of gay cops now in san francisco and they don't do that sort of thing anymore in New York City okay we know okay let's wait for sorry