Free City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s by Edmund White

calling ourselves the Pink Panthers and doubling back behind the cops and coming out behind them on Gay Street and Christopher Street and kicking in a chorus line. We were shouting “Gay is good” in imitation of the slogan “Black is beautiful.”
    Up till that moment we had all thought that homosexuality was a medical term. Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group—with rights, a culture, an agenda. June 28, 1969, was a big date in gay history.
    GLBT leaders like to criticize young gays for not taking the movement seriously, but don’t listen to them. Just remember that at Stonewall we were defending our right to have fun, to meet each other, and to have sex.
    A Black Maria had carted off half the staff and a few kicking, writhing drag queens, while the rest of the policemen waited inside with the others. I’d been walking past with a friend and now joined in, though resistance to authority made me nervous. I thought we shouldn’t create a fuss. This was bad for our image. I said out loud, “Oh, come on, guys.”
    Yet even I got excited when the crowd started battering down the barricaded door with a ripped-up parking meter and when someone tossed lit garbage into the bar. No matter that we were defending a Mafia club. The Stonewall was a symbol, just as the leveling of the Bastille had been. No matter that only six prisoners had been in the Bastille and one of those was Sade, who clearly deserved being locked up. No one chooses the right symbolic occasion; one takes what’s available.
    Two weeks later I wrote a letter about the event to Alfred and Ann Corn, a young married couple I’d only recently met and who were away for the summer on the West Coast. I obviously had no idea how serious the uprising was or would prove to be, how it would usher in a whole new era of gay consciousness. It would turn out to be as epoch-making as the 1934 Nazi raid on and destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, which ended the first gay liberation movement in history. In the late 1980s I concluded a novel, The Beautiful Room Is Empty , with a lengthy description of the event.

Chapter 7
    About this time I met Richard Howard, the poet, critic, and translator. A guy I’d been dating named Frank had started chatting with Richard at a West Village gay bar. Frank told Richard that he had a friend (me) who’d written a “brilliant” novel no one would buy. (In truth, Frank hadn’t read it.) Richard scrawled out his phone number on a trick card provided by the bar and kept close to the entrance and told Frank to have me call him.
    As Frank said, “I think he’s the only established writer who goes to the bars.” Certainly no one I knew had ever met a real writer, though strangely enough one of the first things Richard said to me was “When we were young, the older writers were all very remote and regal, but now we are completely available to the young.”
    I called Mr. Howard and he laughed a bit insultingly (or was it just nervously?) and said in a brisk, possibly peremptory tone, “Stand on the corner of Thirteenth Street and Eighth Avenue exactly at two o’clock today and I’ll come hurrying past on the way to my shrink and effect a manuscript-lift.”
    A bit stunned, I repeated the details just to make sure I’d—but Mr. Howard interrupted me and laughed and said, “Yes, that’s what I just said.” And he hung up.
    At the appointed time I was standing on the corner (half a block from my new apartment) with the manuscript in hand. I waswearing sawed-off blue-jean shorts and a maroon T-shirt. My hair was freshly washed and combed, but I wished I’d slept better and didn’t have such dark circles under my eyes. Suddenly I saw him whirling up the street at a fast clip in a cape, his bald head gleaming. He sized me up with a head-to-toe survey and a cocked eyebrow. I had no idea what sort of impression I made. I had already been going to the gym for three years by that point,