For a change the gay channel Logo had something on that lived up to its (Logo’s) potential.  It was a history of the gay migration to Fire Island and The Pines, and it covered parts of the island’s history prior to Stonewall, as well as the changes that came after, and with the AIDS crisis.

There’s a reason why documenting the history of our movement prior to Stonewall is so important, while there are still people alive who lived it first hand.  When I was a kid I’d heard about Fire Island…it was practically a byword for queerness.  Back then Fire Island and Greenwich Village was where all the queers were.  You didn’t go there unless you were queer yourself.  Even Mad magazine, which was aimed at teenage males mostly, would toss out Fire Island jokes from time to time in it’s pages and magazines  for teens weren’t supposed to so much as breath a word about homosexuality back then.  But in those days we all thought Mad was cool, because it was something our parents hated.  Two years after Stonewall, this is the image I was getting about gays from Mad…

Mad #145, Sept ’71, from "Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution" – "To A Gay Liberationist"

This is what the pop culture was telling me about gay people when I was 17.  Three months later I came out to myself.  I have to say in all fairness that Mad Magazine isn’t hostile to gay people now, like it was back when I was a gay teen struggling to understand myself.  In fact, they’re positively amazing, even by today’s standards.  I suppose they understand now that some of their readers are dealing with their own process of coming out.  But the late 60s and early 70s were not nearly so tolerant and it’s hard to grasp now, when we’re to the point of fighting for marriage rights, how bad it was back then.  Which is why histories like the one Logo was showing tonight are so important.  There are a lot of people who would like to take us all back to those days.

And so here I am, 35 years later, watching this history of Fire Island on Logo raptly. I was too young to be part of the pre-Stonewall era, but not so young that I didn’t hear stuff about homosexuals.  And now I’m hearing from them, the people, gay and straight, who experienced that first wave of gay migrations to the island what those times were like from their point of view… 

…and I’m hearing about how a certain hotel/club got started there, called The Botel, and how it’s ownership passed into the hands of a gay man…and how the tradition of "Tea Dances" started there (late afternoon, when the dances were held, was called "low tea"…I guess it’s a New England thing…).  And I learn that back in those days it was illegal for men to dance with men.  Not illegal as in, get a ticket and pay a fine, but illegal as in get arrested and thrown in jail and have your life ruined when your name is printed in the newspapers the next day and suddenly your boss and your neighbors and everyone you know finds out you’re a faggot.  That kind of illegal…

…so the male Tea Dancers would form a kind of cabaret line and find one woman…she didn’t need to be heterosexual herself…to dance with all these guys who were really dancing with each other but had to be careful about not dancing too much like they were dancing with each other or they might get arrested.  The gay owner of the club would watch the dancers and warn them if they started being too obvious, and tell them they had to stop or leave…

…and there are several people in this Fire Island documentary explaining this as I watch and listen, and one of them explains that the police would regularly raid The Botel anyway, and another man says that sometimes the police would patrol the streets around the club and arrest random young men as they left.  On those nights, this man says, the bartenders would get the word somehow and warn people not to leave the club alone, but go out in large groups.  Another man says that the police had arrest quotas when then went on these raids.  Typically, he says, they had to arrest at least twenty gays…

…and I listen to another man explaining that there was a large telephone pole near the Botel, and that it had a chain fastened to it…and the police would randomly arrest gay men as they found them leaving the Botel and cuff them to this chain…one by one…until they had their twenty for that night…and they would put them all on the boat back to the mainland and to jail. 

This happened on Fire Island, in the 1960s, during a time when a lot of gay men and lesbians regarded Fire Island as a place they could go to get away from the oppression they felt in their daily lives.  It was a place where could be "among your own kind", the people in the documentary were telling me as I watched.  You felt like you were in a world apart, they said.  Back home was the closet, the constant fear of discovery, the need to keep your head down.  On Fire Island you felt like you were getting away from all that, they said.  But you never knew when the police might grab you off the street, handcuff you to a chain with twenty or more other homosexuals, and take you by boat to a jail on the mainland.  Because you were a homosexual.

And now you know another reason why Stonewall finally happened.