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Interview with Dick Leitsch Former Chairman of the Mattachine Society New York

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Interview with Dick Leitsch Former Chairman of the Mattachine Society New York

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3-minute interview

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The Mattachine Society was one of the first gay rights groups in the country. On April 21, 1966 they staged a "Sip-In": they went into a tavern, declared that they were gay, ordered a drink - and waited to be served, or turned away, in order to sue.

SCOTT SIMON, host:

Before Stonewall, there was the "Sip-In." In 1966, gay bars were technically legal in New York but they were often raided by agents of the State Liquor Authority, which had a regulation against serving homosexuals in bars on the idea that they were disorderly.

The Mattachine Society was one of the first gay rights groups in the country. And on April 21 of 1966 the society decided to take inspiration from the civil rights sit-ins that integrated so many lunch counters in restaurants and stage a "sip-in": go into a tavern, declared that were gay, order a drink, then wait to be served or turned away, and then sue.

Today, the bar called Julius(ph) welcomes gays and commemorated the sip-in on Thursday as part of Pride Week in New York. Dick Leitsch was then head of the New York Mattachine Society. He joins us from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

Mr. DICK LEITSCH (Former Chairman, Mattachine Society New York): It's a pleasure.

SIMON: Why did you settle on Julius?

Mr. LEITSCH: Well, first of all, we were going to go to this bar on 8th Street. They had a sign in their window saying, if you're gay, go away. And we thought that would be very dramatic and we'd go there and ask for service and see what happened. We notified the press and being gay, we got there late. And the New York Times had already gotten there and said, what about this gay demonstration? And the manager said, what? So he closed the place for the day.

When we got there, there's a sign on the door saying, closed today. And so then we decided we had to go Julius' because Julius' had been raided like 10 days before. The bar would have a sign in the window saying, this is a raided premises, and very often they'd put a uniformed cop on the stool inside the door, and he sat there until the trial came up.

So we knew that Julius' would not serve us because they have this thing pending. And so when we walked in, the bartender put glasses in front of us, and we told him that we were gay and we intended to remain orderly, we just wanted service. And he said, hey, you're gay, I can't serve you, and he put his hands over the top of the glass, which made wonderful photographs. The whole thing ended up in court, and the court decided well, yes, the Constitution says that people have the right to peacefully assemble and the state can't take that right away from you. And so the Liquor Authority can't prevent gay people from congregating in bars.

And the importance of this, I think, was that until this time gay people had never really fought back. We just sort of take in everything passively, didn't do anything about it. And this time we did it, and we won.

SIMON: I got to tell you, Mr. Leitsch, listening to you describe what life was like for gays in New York in the mid-'60s, I wonder. In 2008, when young gays can observe gays getting married, gays owning multi-billion dollar corporations, do they know this history?

Mr. LEITSCH: I don't think so. You know, in the gay world we're missing a couple of generations here who died of AIDS, so there's not the continuity. And history has always been a problem for gay people because we're a different sort of minority. You know, black people have black children. Irish people have Irish children. The gay people tend to have straight parents. There's no generational hand down sort of thing here, you know.

SIMON: Mr. Leitsch, is there still a Mattachine Society?

Mr. LEITSCH: Oh, no, not after Stonewall. I kept saying, what's the goal of Mattachine? And I always said the goal of Mattachine is put ourselves out of business. When the cops walked into Stonewall, they tried to close it. People said, no, you're not going to close our bar. We have a right to have our bars and it's been established we have the right to have our bars. And Mattachine had nothing to do with Stonewall. That was something where the people rose up and did it. And that's the beginning of the gay movement.

SIMON: Dick Leitsch, former chairman of the New York Mattachine Society. Thanks so much.

Mr. LEITSCH: Thank you very much. It's pleasure being here. And Happy Gay Pride Day.

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Remembering a 1966 'Sip-In' for Gay Rights

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The Mattachine Society was one of the first gay rights groups in the country. On April 21, 1966 they staged a "Sip-In": they went into a tavern, declared that they were gay, ordered a drink - and waited to be served, or turned away, in order to sue.

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Ada Oklahoma Evening News, 1969

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Homophiles
New York Columbia Spectator, 1967

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New York Columbia Spectator, 1968

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A San Francisco-based group of women who organized around lesbian issues

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San Francisco, 1955: The Daughters of Bilitis · "Gay is Good": Gay and Lesbian Organizing in DC, 1961-1975 · Rainbow History Project Digital Collections

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The Rainbow History Project is an all-volunteer organization comprised of a diverse group of archivists, librarians, photographers, lawyers, and other members of the Washington, D.C. community who are dedicated to collecting, preserving, and promoting an active knowledge of the history, arts, and culture relevant to sexually diverse communities in metropolitan Washington D.C.

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On Friday afternoon, officials from the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and also to honor Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month.

The embrace of the gay rights movement by Wall Street - the title of the stock exchange event was "From Stonewall to Federal Hall" - was a striking example of how much things have changed for lesbians and gay men in four decades. The change is brought into relief in a monthlong exhibition, "1969: The Year of Gay Liberation," that opened June 1 at the New York Public Library.

Using the Stonewall uprising, which began in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, as a starting point, the exhibition focuses on the pivotal months that followed, charting the emergence of a new strain of militant activism - exemplified by groups like the Gay Liberation Front, Radicalesbians and the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries - that expressed a new vision of gay freedom.

The activist vision of that era, the exhibition suggests, was more far-reaching than the so-called homophile movement, which had used a more cautious approach, and also more critical of societal institutions like the family than the contemporary gay rights movement, which has been dominated in recent years by the debate over same-sex marriage.

Jason Baumann, who curated the exhibition and also coordinates the extensive collection of gay materials in the library's Manuscripts and Archives Division, contrasted the new exhibition with "Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall," the library's landmark show in 1994 on the history of gay and lesbian life in New York.

That exhibition, which occurred shortly after the 25th anniversary of Stonewall and during the peak of the AIDS epidemic, served in some ways as both a celebration of gay resilience and as memorial to AIDS victims, Mr. Baumann said. The new show, which occupies a small gallery on the third floor of the library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, is more tightly focused on the political agitation that blossomed over a fairly short period of time.

"I think there's more complacency now, and that's why we wanted to focus on these utopian groups - like the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance," Mr. Baumann, who was involved in AIDS activism in the 1990s, said in a phone interview. "It's a little less celebratory than 'Becoming Visible' in that way - to have people think through the political agenda of these groups, and how the political agenda has changed."

The exhibition begins with a discussion of the earliest enduring gay-rights groups - the Mattachine Society, founded in 1951, and the Daughters of Bilitis, begun in 1955. They were part of what was then known as the homophile movement, which sought the repeal of sodomy laws and promote greater tolerance of homosexuals. (A Mattachine flyer, on view in the exhibition, said the group "tries to create a climate of understanding and acceptance.")

"Gays and lesbians began to organize during the 1950s with the homophile movement, but were hampered by the lack of a political language with which to express their experience, as they were neither a class nor an ethnicity but, instead, were considered victims of a moral and medical defect," Mr. Baumann writes in the introduction to the exhibition.

By the 1960s, some activists had begun to see the homophile groups as being too accommodating of medical and legal authorities. They began to protest the exclusion of gays from the military and federal service. Mattachine's New York chapter challenged the State Liquor Authority's ban on serving gay patrons; protested police entrapment of gays; and tried to build support from local officials, like Mayor John V. Lindsay, who were seen as sympathetic to gays.

The Stonewall uprising, which resulted in property damage and arrests that the exhibition describes as "minimal," catalyzed the emerging militancy. "What shocked both gays and the straight establishment was that gays had, for once, openly fought back," Mr. Baumann writes.

By 1970, a committee had split off from the Mattachine and called itself the Gay Liberation Front. "They demanded liberation in the spirit of the national liberation and anticapitalist struggles around the world," Mr. Baumann writes. A draft platform for the front, dated July 11, 1970, and on view in the exhibition, hints at its radical agenda: "We oppose the family and support the living collective."

The Gay Liberation Front became an "incubator of the new gay and lesbian mass political movement" that was emerging, Mr. Baumann says.

A group of activist lesbian women - calling themselves the Radicalesbians - split off from the front, seeking to place "lesbianism at the center of feminist politics as a political, cultural and erotic resistance to patriarchy," as Mr. Baumann writes. ("Smash phallic tyranny," a flier by the group, on view in the exhibition, implores.)

Transsexual and transvestite activists also mobilized around this time; one group, the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, helped pave the way for the agitation that resulted in the abolition of New York's anti-transvetism laws in 1971.

In December 1969, a small group of Gay Liberation Front activists split off to establish the Gay Activists Alliance. They demanded civil rights legislation from Mayor Lindsay and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller. They set up a gay community center in SoHo. They held protests after the March 1970 death of Diego Vinales, a gay man who jumped from a window after a police raid on a gay bar called the Snake Pit. They also held "zaps," or public protests, to draw attention to their cause, sponsoring a sit-in, for example, at the state Republican Party headquarters in 1970. And they established, that same year, what became an annual gay pride parade.

"The annual march, like the many ethnic parades in the city, demonstrated gays, lesbians and transgender people as articulate constituencies," Mr. Baumann writes in the conclusion to the exhibition. "It became a living symbol of the evolution of L.G.B.T. political communities."

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Revisiting 1969 and the Start of Gay Liberation

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On Friday afternoon, officials from the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and also to honor Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month.

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Lorraine Hansberry, author of "A Raisin in the Sun" writes to "The Ladder"

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Lorraine Hansberry, author of "A Raisin in the Sun" writes to "The Ladder"

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The letters reveal a woman joyous about being able to discuss sexual identity, same-sex attraction, feminism and more. "You are obviously serious people," she wrote in the May 1957 letter, "and I feel that women, without wishing to foster any strict separatist notions, homo or hetero, indeed have a need for their own publications and organizations."

In August of that year another letter appeared; in it, she wrote that her first letter had been "rather talky, I'm afraid" but that she was pleased to see that the points it raised about transvestitism had sparked a conversation in the pages of The Ladder. She wrote, "there are those who have given and are giving attention to the question in a most serious way."

She added, "Good. I feel I am learning how to think all over again."

It can be painful to read her description of the problem of a lesbian in a heterosexual marriage, "an individual who finds that, despite her conscious will oft. times, she is inclined to have her most intense emotional and physical reactions directed toward other women, quite beyond any comparative thing she might have ever felt for her husband - whatever her sincere affection for him? And isn't that the problem? How one quite admits to oneself - and to one's husband?"

She concludes, "I don't think people start out in this world to be 'bad' - they start out to be happy."

Catherine Morris, curator for the Sackler Center, said that the exhibition follows her view of how best to use the small, fourth-floor space known as the Herstory Gallery. Artifacts like the copies of The Ladder, she said, address biographical questions and facts about a person's life that open up a dialogue. People whose lives are featured in the gallery are drawn from the permanent exhibition adjacent to it, " The Dinner Party " a room-size landmark work by Judy Chicago.

Having the little magazines themselves on display provides a dose of reality in a world that is increasingly experienced virtually, Ms. Morris said. "There is a real difference in seeing an object: the aura of an actual thing that somebody got in the mail in 1957."

The most personal part of the exhibition could be the pages that Ms. Hansberry wrote only to herself, birthday summaries of her likes and dislikes that she began writing at 23. Those pages read like blank verse, and are snarky and childlike, with a nagging insecurity. At 28, in 1959, she wrote that she liked, among other things, "Conversations with James Baldwin" and "MAIL, Lots of it, which I now get." She hated "Stupidity" and "Ignorance" and "Loneliness!" and "FEAR," as well as "Seeing my picture!" and "Reading my interviews."

And, she wrote, "I AM BORED WITH:"

"A Raisin in the Sun"; "Most sexual experiences," and "myself."

"I want," she wrote, "To work" and "TO BE IN LOVE!"

At the age of 30, she liked "the insistent penetration of autumn sunlight" and also

the fact that I have changed

have stayed the same

have grown more self-conscious and - at the same time -

become less aware of myself

mushrooms, out of the can

The first drink of scotch

the second

the third

"I dislike," she wrote, "a goodly number of people" and "that fifth drink of scotch," along with "the state of the world" and "critics" and "my own pomposity."

Ms. Morris, sitting in a work room of the Brooklyn Museum and showing these pages to a visitor, said "Her voice is just incredibly thoughtful, but also really clear." A humanistic morality "comes through in all her letters," Ms. Morris said. And the other papers, including a charming line drawing, a self-portrait, provide a glimpse into the life of a complex artist.

In the list for 1962, Ms. Hansberry wrote, "I regret - (this now comes first; ah age, age: thou art cruel)." She added, "That love is really as elusive as everybody over 30 knows it to be."

Ms. Hansberry, born in 1930, died of cancer in 1965.

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The letters reveal a woman joyous about being able to discuss sexual identity, same-sex attraction, feminism and more. "You are obviously serious people," she wrote in the May 1957 letter, "and I feel that women, without wishing to foster any strict separatist notions, homo or hetero, indeed have a need for their own publications and organizations."

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