American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with Virgina Apuzzo, 1 of 3

many years ago. I'm not going to go there. Okay. All right. Excuse me. So let's talk about maybe just generally growing up. When you think of yourself as a child, did you, were you aware of homosexuality as an idea? I thinking about my childhood growing up in the Bronx in the 1940s, 1950s. I knew that I was in love with my best girlfriend when I was 10 and I knew that that wasn't a great idea because when I proposed to her, she stopped being my best friend. There was nothing to look toward, no place to put a hook. Until, and I don't know what year this was, until Christine Jorgensen came about the first

transgendered person that hit the newspaper. She happened to come from Zareka Avenue in the Bronx, which was not far from where I lived. And I would walk by that street and wonder is that what my destiny is going to be? Is that what I am? Is that what I have to become? And of course, you can imagine how the newspapers treated the story of Christine Jorgensen, who was a male army person, I believe, an army soldier, and got this operation in Denmark. And of course, the jokes became, you know, going to Denmark. So growing up in those years, you had no hook, you had no home base to look for, you had no place to try to find an identity. And when you got a word, the word was homosexuality and you looked it up. It said the most dreadful things. It said nothing about being a person. It was as if they

were identifying a thing. And that was my experience growing up. And of course, being Catholic, being Italian Catholic, it had all kinds of overlays about sinful and hell and all of the baggage that comes with religion and homosexuality. So how did you feel inside? As a child, my experience is thinking about who I was. The word that comes to mind is dread. The word that comes to mind, when I think of how I felt about myself and how I felt about what I would become, I was filled with dread. And dread is something that children should not live with dread. It's a too

great weight, too heavy a burden to think about that. And no place to find the sense of worth and yourself, no matter how good you try to be, you have this sense of there is something that is bad about me. Because the only places you know to look are church and some book with a definition in it. Wasn't easy. And so what did you do to try to kind of cope with this being? I became a really good tomboy. I could play ball better than I was always picked for the team. I became a really good tomboy and I became a kind of social pariah to the other girls in the neighborhood. Nobody's mother wanted them to play with me. And then I became

really good in school because it occurred to me that the only way out from having to get married being an Italian daughter of the oldest son was to make sure that I got to go to college. And so I worked in school as a it was an avenue of escape from me. And that was the only way that I was doing it. It's just, you have to wait a minute. When you grow up an Italian Catholic in the Bronx, you begin going to church. Your grandmother takes your 7 o'clock mass and all the ladies kind of out screech the priest,

raise them through the mass. I grew up with that. I grew up in a very Catholic household. And the conflict of issues of redemption, of is it possible that if you are this thing called a homosexual, is it possible to be redeemed? Is that conceivable? And that was a very haunting issue for me. I mean, what kind of existence is it to be born into something and no matter what you do, you'll condemn to hell? And pursuing that question lasted for me into my late 20s. I entered the convent at 26 to pursue that question. I studied theology at Manhattan College and pursued that question and I was convinced that I would either stay until I got an answer or if I didn't get an answer, just stay. And I did get an answer and left. Stonewall was a very big piece of the answer that I got. Stonewall

gave me the courage to say, yeah, gay is good. And so, can you place it in a moment in time? Do you remember when you were at the nunnery when you were... I was, yes. And I was in the convent in 1969 and was very aware of what was going on and very curious about it. And subsequent to the actual riot went down to the village just to be in the presence of that activity, to be where that energy was, to somehow make it a piece of my own. And subsequently, I left the convent not too long after that. And immediately, spirited out where things were happening in the game movement. And went

to LFL, the gay academic union, and began that whole journey around my own lesbianism. And back to the convent, when you were trying to figure out if you really were going to be condemned or what? The issue of redemption. I mean, it's a fundamental issue in literature and everything. You know, it's about what happens to your life. What is your life about? And I saw every institution saying that my life was not a worthy one. That if I were this person that I felt I had to be, then I was a sinner. And a sinner goes to hell. You learn that in the Baltimore Catechism. So pursuing that question and finding an answer that somehow reflected goodness back to me was a critical journey for me. And I can't

believe that I'm alone in searching for an answer to that. Because no child should really feel dread in their childhood. Should really feel that their life can't have that glorious, redemptive quality that I think comes about when you feel good about yourself. Did your life in the convent make you feel more isolated or less so? Well, my parents were afraid that I would become pregnant. So they insisted that I go to a Catholic school. So they sent me to Cathedral High School where there were 4,000 girls. It was kind of a little bit of heaven. When I went into the convent, I took it very seriously. I played by the rules. And I found some very heart-wrenching kinds of experiences that women have when they have never come to grips with their sexuality. And here I was in

a struggle about my sexuality. So it was reflected back to me and I was experiencing it. So my time in the convent is something that I think contributed greatly to my growth. And we also talked before we get to Stonewall and what that meant, which was really important. You were telling me a little bit about isolation. Okay, so in the 1950s and 60s, there were thousands and thousands of positive gay people. What's the downside of just living quietly in isolation? Or is there a, is there a, what's the mental price that was paid by being called? The price of being alone is an extraordinary price. It deprives you of your identity. It deprives you of, of ever being away, of ever feeling like there's someone with whom you can be in us. The amount of energy you put in hiding, it never gives you a sense

of worthiness. You're always feeling as if you're lying, as if the truth doesn't matter anymore. I'm sorry. Okay, all right. So that's that that you see what I mean, you're sure the paving away for what a generation of people must have felt. And you've done so much thinking about things when I know, you know, that you could perhaps talk a little bit about the difference between loneliness

and isolation and what, I mean black, okay, 1960s, blacks came together, there was a black pantheon fighting, there was some march and some of it, there were people like Martin Luther King, as Rosa Parks, people who were icons of movement, women would have dream greed or other things. And certainly there was a simple way, there would be a progester's all over the place of that role, less to whole generation. What about you? Well, the question of isolation, the question of loneliness, the question of not finding your place, not hearing your niche. Yes, a piece of me could be elicited from the woman's movement. A piece of me could be responsive to the black civil rights movement. And certainly the war movement called forth a piece of us. But the fact of the matter is we could never bring our whole selves to anything. We were never able to be there as who we were. We were

never able to make coalition giving who we are a name and having it embraced by those people with whom we were happy to be allies. Well, before Stonewall, they weren't gay people. Before Stonewall, they were people who went to bars, people who dressed up, people who sought to protect themselves and remain apart. It was as if you took off your clothes at the end of a day and could briefly be yourself. And the next morning you put the lie back on and went out into the world. That's not an authentic life. That's not a life that from which you can get joy. That's not a person. There's no one with whom you can share who you really are. That's oppression. That's what oppression is.

And I think the oppression was somewhat invisible because, or only felt on a very private way and not recognized because there wasn't a group. Yeah. I think what we felt in isolation was a growing pressure, a growing sense of outrage and fury, particularly because we looked around and saw so many avenues of rebellion, of expression of demanding to be seen and to be heard or to have a perspective seen or heard. And yet it still wasn't possible to claim a name, to claim a place, to join in as who you are. Okay. Okay. Okay. I won't move. It's hard to get an Italian nut to move. Yeah, hold this one. I'm going to twist this as you can put it down.

Go ahead. The oppression. What kind of, I mean, blacks were oppressed. You know, women were making what men were in the dollar for that's for a, you know, in any given job. What, what was it that was so particularly offensive? What's so bad about not being yourself? The question is, what's so bad about not being yourself? If you perceive not being yourself as a luxury, as a, as a kind of a, a little luxury, you know, being yourself as a luxury, being yourself is essential. It's part of the essence of being a person is to be able to bring your old self to someone to something. It has to do with the authenticity of your life. And to deprive people of their authenticity is to deprive them of the real, the most important part of their life. And to have people

hide deprives them of their dignity. And to have images that are ridiculed, that you know really are about you. That's oppression. Oh, I, the, the problems of, of suicide, of finding refuge in alcohol and substance abuse. They were, they were monumental. I mean, our community continues to real from problems of alcoholism and substance abuse. And much of it goes back to the fact that we could only socialize as an in dark, dingy places and drink water down alcohol. And that was supposed to be your social environment. What does that say about who you are, how you see yourself? Very degradating. Very degradating. So the purpose of the bars, do you think it was, what was the purpose of the bars and

well, the purpose of the bars and the village from my point of view was to support the mafia? The purpose of the bars from our point of view was where could we go to find another? It's really a very pivotal point in our history. Most of us grew up as an eye. I am, I am. We really didn't discover a we for a long time. It was when we could reach out and see another. Go to a place and find another. That we began to see that we are a we when not just an eye. It's very important in terms of your social understanding and your sense of yourself in a place among others. So the, the, the bars had that, that, that opportunity, quite frankly, they, they, they, it wasn't what I would consider to be an optimal social opportunity for a young person.

What there was sort of an evil, a necessary evil. Yeah. That they weren't exactly, there wasn't a loving relationship between the management and the cops. Not at all, not at all. There was a very exploitative relationship between the clientele. I can remember the first time I went into a bar. A bouncer stood at the door and said, are you gay? And for the first time, my, no one has ever asked me that question. I turned and said, yeah, I'm gay. And you know, I looked around at the room. Nobody seemed happy. Nobody seemed uplifted. And to have the very first experience you have walking into what should be a social environment, being a question that almost sounded like an accusation. That was my experience. It was not something that I thought was warm loving or, or in any way, entertaining. I'm not sure if I didn't step on you when you were saying, it can you repeat the phrase or the line, the gay bar of the 60s were necessary evil. Oh, I, I have found, it's my experience that the gay bars in the, in the early years

were basically a necessary evil. They, they, they, with the only places we could go, they were exploitative places. And they were run by and large by criminal elements. But in and of itself, doesn't that send a message? Yep. The message is, this is the, this is all your worth. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't just the bars. I mean, the entire environment, if you look politically at, um, an executive order issued by Eisenhower, um, basically said that, that federal government didn't have to hire you. Now, if the federal government wouldn't hire you, you have to see that the federal government is the largest single employer in the nation. If the federal government says we don't have to hire those people, what are other business owners say? If you can't get insurance, if you are considered less than creditworthy, so you can't buy a house within a FHA loan. If you are, uh, hiding yourself in order to serve in the military, how

many messages do you need to be told, you are not valued. And then if you want to go to church, you're a sinner. So every message in society was one that said you're not good enough. And something that you said, so, uh, clearly, when this book in the phone was, and I'm just rephrasing it my own way, you talked about the three main institutions that all oppressed that, you know, the three major institutions in any culture are law, religion, medicine, the medical institution. All three institutions in our society came out with their greatest sanctions against homosexuals. To the law, we're still felons in over a dozen states. To the church, we were sinners and to the medical establishment we were treated as sick. So when you have those three major institutions coming together and essentially

identifying your worthlessness, that's, that's a clear message. And there wasn't quite any other group. I mean, it was just that they had all three. No, I mean, you know, the, and I'm not comfortable weighing whose oppression is worse, but I think the African American community always was able to take refuge in church. They, what little, what little latitude they had in the society, the church became a refuge to them. The church was no refuge to gay people. It was one more institution wagging a finger at it. And what was the, what was the downside of the, the kind of practical implications of the medical world being again? Well, the medical establishment considered you sick. And so I have friends whose parents sent them to mental institutions. Oh, what, what, what, what it meant to be considered sick was your parents felt perfectly

fine about handing you over to a doctor. And if that doctor believed that, that homosexuality was a mental illness, you could be sent to a mental institution. And indeed, I have friends who spent time in mental institutions who were subjected to shock treatment. This was not, this was not something that should be ever forgotten. We've, we've, we've been sorely treated by three major institutions and we carry those scars. What was the shock treatment that, what, what, what were the doctors trying to do there? What were doctors trying to do? They were trying to cure you. They were trying to somehow change your behavior, make you more docile, more easy to, easier to handle. Because, you know, the American Psychiatric Association said, you were ill. And what cures were available?

Now, in terms of finding, going back to the momentless issue, finding, did you personally feel that you could find other people like you? There's not the internet. No, look, if you go back to those days, and you wanted to find, let's say you wanted to find a gay something, there was no word gay. So you look in the telephone book for homosexual, there was no homosexual. And as a matter of fact, if there was an organization, they wouldn't list it in the telephone book. So the, the, the conspiracy to keep you isolated was very broad and very real. I think that's also going to be part of the people. It's really a young generation to imagine because everybody is Google. Yeah. Yeah, well, you didn't, you had, you still had men and women wanted in the, in the newspaper. The New York Times

would have, you know, male wanted employment. Women want employment. You know, there was such, it was, it was such a different time from where we are today.