Free Stonewall by Martin Duberman

thoughta dubious blessing; he was already suspect in the neighborhood for his “swell-headed” bragging that he intended to study Russian and become a diplomat (what he hadn’t announced was that he, too, was gay).
    To the neighborhood’s satisfaction, Yvonne lasted only two years at Seattle University (though Freddy graduated with honors). She did well academically—thanks to how bright she was, not to how diligently she applied herself. And she dutifully joined the prestigious Alpha Kappa Alpha black sorority. But then, as an antidote to that conventional social scene, she got in with an older black crowd that included Patti Bown (later well known as a pianist) and spent much of her time, as she had in high school, in the jazz clubs—and also in pursuing a love affair, the last she would have with a man. Moreover—and without really needing the money, but attracted to the thrills—she set up an inventive fence operation in which she sold (at a 50 percent commission) the booty some of her navy friends won while gambling aboard ship.
    Yvonne enjoyed the edgy secrecy of moving in and out of disparate worlds, some of them clandestine, some of them proper. And that included the gay world. While still back in New Rochelle, she had managed to connect with a few very discreet lesbians in the surrounding towns, but when she set out to explore gay life in Seattle, she soon found that there was little to explore.
    The West Coast certainly had its share of bars; although there were not more than thirty exclusively lesbian clubs in the whole country in late 1963, the West Coast had for several decades boasted a fair number of them—as well as the ubiquitous undercover agents and surprise police raids that were their invariable accompaniment. Mona’s in San Francisco, which opened for business in 1936, was probably the best known of the early lesbian bars. Their number increased during and after World War II, with the If Club and the Star Room in Los Angeles becoming especially popular. 1
    But Seattle lagged far behind. Yvonne did locate a few places rumored to be gay, but she had scant success in meeting other lesbians or getting connected to a gay network. Not that she felt at all desperate; she was “having a ball” exploring a variety of worlds, and felt content in not committing to any of them.
    During the summer vacation following her second year at Seattle, when she was back in her family’s house in New Rochelle, Yvonne suddenly broke out in an acute case of acne. She had never had so much as a pimple before; now her face was a mass of bumps andsores. Her mother took her to a well-known dermatologist, who promptly prescribed a series of X-rays—the then-touted experimental treatment. The X-rays literally burned the face, leaving patches of black skin that slowly peeled off. Yvonne felt so disfigured after the treatments that she decided not to return to Seattle, and indeed rarely left the house for a year. The experimental X-ray treatment for acne soon fell out of favor with dermatologists, but not before, in Yvonne’s view, it had inflicted hidden internal damage that may well have contributed to the string of physical problems, and especially lupus, that would subsequently plague her.
    Even before the X-ray treatments, she had seemed unusually susceptible to physical ailments. At twelve she had had a mild form of polio, which thereafter made her tire easily whenever she tried to play sports—though her tight, wiry body made her look like a natural athlete. Then at fourteen she had developed dysmenorrhea—painful cramps accompanying menstruation—later followed by endometriosis, which predisposed her to vaginal cysts and tumors.
    None of this had kept her from being her mother’s daughter—a high-energy, can-do person who could party till dawn. But two or three days a month, when the cramping and medications got her down, Yvonne took to her bed; the