rebels, rubyfruit, and rhinestones Page ii is blank. Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones queering space in the stonewall south james t. sears RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sears, James T. (James Thomas), 1951– Rebels, rubyfruit, and rhinestones : queering space in the Stonewall South / by James T. Sears. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8135-2964-6 (alk. paper) 1. Lesbians—Southern States—History—20th century. 2. Gay men—Southern States—History—20th century. I. Title. HQ 75.6.U52 S689 2001 305.9'0664'0975—dc21 00-068348 British Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2001 by James T. Sears All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, elec- tronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without writ- ten permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Manufactured in the United States of America To Bob Williamson, without whom none of this would have been possible Page vi is blank. contents Foreword by Franklin E. Kameny ■ ix Acknowledgments ■ xiii Introduction Toward a Community of Memory ■ 1 One A Psychedelic Wedding ■ 5 Two The Queen Bee ■ 13 Three Gay Is Good ■ 20 Four The Pied Piper of Athena ■ 34 Five Bobby’s Story ■ 41 Six Prometheus and the Tumblebugs ■ 48 Seven Sunflowers and Trash ■ 59 Eight The Horny Bull ■ 73 Nine Brigadistas and Barricades ■ 86 Te n Fire and Decadence ■ 96 Eleven Atlas Shrugged ■ 107 Twelve The Promised Land ■ 119 Thirteen The Sorority ■ 131 Fourteen Separations ■ 142 Fifteen Awakenings and Departures ■ 150 vii viii contents Sixteen Seventy-five Lesbians ■ 165 Seventeen Out in the Outfield ■ 177 Eighteen Lexington Six ■ 187 Nineteen Tidewater Struggles ■ 197 Twenty Time of Miracles ■ 212 Twenty-one Saving Children ■ 226 Twenty-two Breaking Silences ■ 246 Twenty-three Hurricane Warnings ■ 265 Twenty-four Eyes on the Prize ■ 285 Twenty-five A Gathering of Tribes ■ 299 Twenty-six Communities of Memory ■ 312 Notes ■ 325 Index ■ 399 foreword Although there were some precursors many years earlier, the modern Ameri- can gay movement commenced, with continuity, in 1951 in Los Angeles. For almost twenty years it remained a tiny movement, in which every- one involved knew everyone else involved. In keeping with the pro- foundly, often punitively repressive climate of the times on sex in general and homosexuality in particular, it was usually bland, apologetic, unassertive, and defensive. Instead of recognizing that we gays are the authorities on ourselves and our homosexuality, they relied upon “experts”—psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, lawyers, theologians, and so forth—who spoke about us, to us, and at us, but never with us. The fledgling movement tried hard to become a grassroots movement, but never quite succeeded over its first two decades. When I first began my active involvement in what was then called the Homophile Movement, in 1961, there were only five or six homophile organizations in the country, all on either the East Coast or the West Coast, with nothing that I knew of in between (except for one chapter of the Mattachine Society in Denver, although there had been a few which had come and gone, including one in Chicago). We referred to the remainder of the country as a “vast desert,” and correctly so. As the 1960s progressed, the middle began to fill in, first with the formation of a revived active group in Chicago, and then one in Kansas City, and gradually elsewhere, and then, seem- ingly, almost everywhere, with fifty or sixty by 1969. But, to our perceptions, the South remained a “desert” for long thereafter, with the only excep- tions, perhaps, being Richard Inman’s short-lived, one-man group in Florida and the Circle of Friends in Dallas, both in the mid-1960s. ix x foreword We began to change the temper of the movement here in Washing- ton, D.C., by taking an activist and militant approach toward the forces arrayed against us, at a time when those words “activist” and “militant” were still dirty words inside the movement. In 1965, at a time when pick- eting was still the extreme expression of dissent, par excellence, we pick- eted at the White House, at other government agencies, and, commencing annually, on July 4 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Active efforts were initiated to ameliorate institutionalized forms of homophobia such as the ban on federal civil service employment of gay people, the ban on gays in the military, the denial of security clearances to gay people, the categorization of homosexuality as pathological by the American Psychiatric Association, anti-sodomy laws, police harassment, and on and on. Our picketing demonstrations laid the groundwork for Stonewall by creating a previously unthinkable mindset that allowed for actual, public demon- strations by openly gay people on their own behalf. As seen in retrospect, one final step needed to be taken in order to lay the foundations for Stonewall and the ensuing activism of the 1970s. Throughout the eons, gays had been subjected to a relentless, unremit- ting, absolutely unrelieved negative assault upon us as gay people, and upon our homosexuality. We were sick; we were sinners; we were perverts and degenerates; we were criminals; we were unreliable, untrustworthy, and unstable. Nothing positive or supportive was ever heard. That took its toll not only by diminishing and eroding the self-confidence and self- esteem of individual gay people, but also by sapping the initiative for politi- cal organization and action. African Americans had run into substantially the same problem in a culture in which black is universally equated with everything bad, undesirable, dirty, ugly, and otherwise negative in every way. They had responded with the slogan “Black Is Beautiful.” In 1968, in conscious imitation of that, I coined the slogan “Gay Is Good.” It was adopted by the Homophile Movement of the time, and began to be widely publicized as an affirmative, “in your face” response to the psy- chological and ideological assaults brought against us. In the tumult of the times “Gay Is Good” was quickly transmuted into and then joined up with “Gay Pride.” Between the two, we then had the psychological underpinnings, the weapons, and the armor with which to take on the world. And in 1969 we started to do so with Stonewall. The Homophile Movement became the Gay Movement or the Gay Rights Movement, and it finally became genuinely grassroots everywhere in the country includ- ing the South. And how it became so in the South is what this book is all about. foreword xi In the past, as a northerner, being born and brought up in New York City, having lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a sizable portion of my early adult life, and living since 1956 in Washington, D.C., at the very edge of the South but not really in it, I tended, along with others of sim- ilar geographical background, almost reflexively and not through conscious, calculated decision, to view southerners as a kind of mythical, exotic people, different from the rest of us Americans in manners, speech, culture, and history, in countless ways that set them apart. Of course experience and fact, numerous visits to various southern cities for lectures, demonstra- tions, and conferences, plus the inexorable march of time and progress, have significantly modified (or at least softened) those impressions on my part, while, simultaneously, time and progress have very much modified the South itself. Although, of course, my impressions and reactions are subjective and idiosyncratic, and quite possibly inaccurate, and are certainly not nec- essarily shared by others, for myself and, I believe, for many other non- southerners, one of our impressions was of a southern gay scene in which “drag” and effeminate mannerisms on the part of males played a much more significant role—in fact a dominant one—than in the gay scene in the remainder of the country. Of course, drag has always been a highly visible element in the urban gay culture generally but, rightly or wrongly, the perception was that it was much more so in the South. All of this represents broad, depersonalized views of the gay South from the outside, from the past, and from afar. From close up and very much from the inside, James T. Sears, in Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones, pre- sents us with a fascinating, marvelously detailed, meticulously and exten- sively researched and compiled, highly structured, wonderfully personalized picture of the early post-Stonewall, southern gay scene as the ferment spreading from Greenwich Village starting in 1969 engulfed the South. Now turn the page and read about it. Franklin E. Kameny Long-time activist, Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights Movement, and coiner of the slogan “Gay Is Good” Page xii is blank. acknowledgments All of the individuals who graciously consented to be interviewed and gladly gave of their time to review draft chapters based on those interviews. Bob Swisher, David Williams, Roger Nelson, Vincent Astor, Roberts Batson, and Patrick Cather, local gay historians who have helped to pre- serve queer history in their southern communities and who kindly pro- vided of their knowledge and expertise. To the archivists and librarians who assisted me in accessing their col- lections, particularly those at: Duke University, Kentucky Gay Archives, International Gay and Lesbian Archives, Lesbian Herstory Archives, MCC- Resurrection Don Botts Collection, and the Stonewall Archives. I would also like to thank the following individuals for providing use- ful background information, who kindly read excerpts from the book based on their knowledge of particular events, or who provided photo- graphs for use in this project: Pokey Anderson, Steve Ault, Bob Basker, Jim Baxter, John Boddie, Perry Brass, Paul D.