Free Labor of Love by Moira Weigel Page B

getting his kicks by threatening men who flirt with him.
    â€œSeveral times I went to San Fran with my gun and when a queer approached me in a bar john I took out the gun and said, ‘Eh? Eh? What’s that you say?’ He bolted.” The boast then turns into bewilderment: “I’ve never understood why I did that; I knew queers all over the country.”
    Sal apologizes for his bad behavior. Like many homophobes before and after, he insists, I have gay friends! Like many homophobes, and like Jack Kerouac, he is also clearly sexually interested in men. It would not take an especially skilled psychoanalyst to point out the symbolism. I just had to show him my penis—I mean, gun! He goes to the Black Cat hoping to get picked up and then snarls at the first person to approach him.
    Sarria quickly worked his way up the Black Cat hierarchy. He started greeting guests, singing arias, and eventually performing as the club’s general emcee. By 1960, he was doing four drag shows a night. In the spotlight, he improvised clever ways to disarm anyone who he feared might make queer patrons feel threatened. Around the turn of the millennium, Sarria boasted to historians of the Black Cat: “I made it gay. It didn’t get gay until I got there.” How do you make a bar gay? By creating an atmosphere where everyone who enters is assumed to be gay. During his show, Sarria addressed himself to a gay audience, regardless of exactly who was present.
    Wearing a sign that said I’M A BOY , he poked fun at the legal pretext that was often used to arrest cross-dressers: “female impersonation with intent to deceive.” (Having to wear such signs had also often been a form of punishment for people arrested for “masquerading in attire not proper to his or her sex.”) Sarria told dirty jokes, spilled gossip about prominent members of the gay community, and sang snippets of opera, altering the lyrics to make them raunchy. Sometimes Sarria made his act overtly political. He would read aloud from the newspaper and interpret recent events. If he caught sight of someone he suspected was slumming, he would storm over to the table, high heels clicking, while everyone stared. Years later, he remembered taking one tourist and his cardigan-wearing wife by storm.
    â€œOh you !” he exclaimed. “So you’re bisexual , are you? I didn’t know I was merely another woman!”
    The man bristled; the wife blushed. But after a moment, they had to acknowledge that Sarria was right. Everyone in the bar was gay, and gay was good. Straight people could come if they wanted, but they would have to accept that they were the outsiders. They could learn what that felt like.
    *   *   *
    At the Black Cat and countless other “homophile” bars, daters went out and claimed new kinds of public spaces. By going out, people who had long been made to feel like outcasts found or created new communities. And as they became confident that these places were theirs , and felt the strength of their numbers, they fought back against authorities who had long tried to control them. The new movement made “coming out” a powerful rallying cry.
    Many of the most famous scenes of the gay liberation movement took place spontaneously, in the places where people went to socialize. Popular histories often date the beginning of the movement to the riots that erupted at the Stonewall Inn in New York’s West Village during the early hours of June 28, 1969. When plainclothes police officers raided the bar, a group of trans women and butch lesbians refused to go to the bathroom to have their sex inspected. Other customers began to refuse to line up to have their IDs checked. Soon the crowds in the bar and the streets were in open revolt.
    Other historians offer other starting points for the swell of LGBT activism in the 1970s. The clash between a group of queens and street hustlers and the Los