Village Voice photographer Fred McDarrah, who died in 2007, currently has an exhibition of gelatin silver prints of photographs he took which have been framed and hung up on the walls at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, a gallery showroom at 474 Broadway in Kingston.
A print of three men being refused a cocktail at Julius’ in 1966, a print of a dozen young men and one woman in thick eyelashes hamming for the camera in a nighttime city scene, a print of an anonymous young man being dragged by his arms through the street by cops in 1989.
These photographs and the 58 others displayed on the walls capture moments, characters and ideas in what was once called the Gay Rights Movement.
In the photograph McDarrah snapped in a Greenwich Village barroom, a bartender wearing the black browline frames is caught in the act of placing his palm to cover over the cocktail in a Collins glass. He wishes to prevent one man in the group from drinking his drink. His customer is a member of the Mattachine Society, an early organization concerned with the rights of gay men. In this photograph, the customers have taken a page out of the civil-rights movement. They came in, ordered drinks, received them and then announced to the bartender in the cardigan that they were homosexuals. This, they called a Sip-In.
In a photo captured of the stylish West Village apostles with one laughing and smiling Mary Magdalene, the bottom of the Stonewall Inn bar sign above their heads can be read. The date of the picture is June 28, 1969. It must be after 1:30 a.m. because the police have already raided the bar, a known hangout for homosexuals to meet and dance, with the intent to bust heads and make arrests.
Hundreds are gathering outside the Stonewall Inn. Though you can’t hear them in the photograph, the crowd is heckling the police officers. Soon they will throw bottles. And fires will start.
In the third photograph, the young man being dragged away by his arms through a street in New York City near City Hall in 1989 was demonstrating with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) for the creation of housing for those dying of AIDS. Inflection point after inflection point, separated years, then by decades.
This Friday, June 28 marks the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Protestors who were there have disputed that characterization of the event as a riot. Over and over again they have been quoted saying that the police themselves labeled the confrontations to justify their preemptive use of force.
“The cops at that time were so macho,” recalls Geddy Sveikauskas, publisher of this newspaper who lived on Sullivan Street south of Houston in 1962 and started coming up to Woodstock in 1968. “It was not uncommon to have the cops beat up gay people just because they were not macho enough,” said Sveikauskas, “And all the gay people in the Village and people who were sympathetic to them, both very large populations, decided that they had had enough. Most gay people at that time were still in the closet, but they were so infuriated they came out of the closet. Many never went back in.”
The night the police raided the Stonewall Inn, their zeal to punish and oppress homosexuals and assert their own idea of masculinity overpowered what they had been trained to do. Those police officers struck the spark that lit a bright, gay conflagration between demonstrators and police that spread across a week of confrontations.
A year later, on the anniversary of the Stonewall Inn uprising, the first ever Gay Pride marches took place in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. The year after that the marches went international: London. Paris. West Berlin. Stockholm.
The offices of the Village Voice in Sheridan Square were right next to the Stonewall Inn. Other than lowering their blinds, the folks at the community paper couldn’t help but cover it. Their reporters, some of whom would be arrested, were first on the scene. Fred McDarrah was there taking pictures of the action.
His pictures on exhibition in black and white, now 55, 45, 35 years old, describe points in time along an arc as the movement arrived and grew.
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